![]() Her background was very different from the minimalists she is now inevitably grouped with. This overlooks the ways in which Berlin’s fiction subtly complicates what it meant to be an American in the latter half of the last century. The publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women in 2015 gave her work attention that was overdue, but in the process she was categorised as a Carver-like chronicler of small-town US life – a writer of quiet, poignant but provincial stories. The Berlin revival is welcome but curious. A hospital employee can’t stand the way certain suffering women look: “God forgive me, because I am a woman too, but when I see women with that look, I want to slap them.” An addict in rehab kills a pack of stray dogs. ![]() A girl decides to do nothing as her pampered younger sister is molested by their grandfather. It isn’t just the rooms the people in them, too, seem out of sorts. ![]() A lonely man in Montana pastes old newspapers on his cabin walls, so that in the winter he can “read his walls, page by page”. ![]() Water from a toilet upstairs drips through the chandelier in a New York apartment. In the collection A Manual for Cleaning Women, a dentist has only one chaise longue in his waiting room: patients usually sit on window sills or radiators – “On the ceiling was a sign, WHAT THE HELL YOU LOOKING UP HERE FOR?” A laundry floor is flooded. You are led into them briskly, without any caveat, and so you expect a degree of familiarity. R ooms are invariably rundown in Lucia Berlin’s stories. ![]()
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