Reading a Lucia Berlin story is like plunging into a conversation with someone far more interesting than most of your best friends. The American short story writer died, largely unsung, in 2004, and her work wasn’t widely read in her lifetime. It’s only in 2015, with Stephen Emerson collating a collection of her work, that she has suddenly found a resonance. A Manual for Cleaning Women stormed The New York Times bestseller list and has earned glowing, half-disbelieving praise from literary quarters. August Kleinzahler described her writing as somewhere between Chekhov and a virtuoso jazz solo.
What’s behind this posthumous leap into the limelight? A more urgent question is why it took so long for us to wake up to Berlin’s talent. The characters in her stories are as vivid and true as those you find in Dickens. Most memorable are the two damaged sisters in “Mama,” comparing blackly funny memories of their hurricane of a mother who wrote deadly serious suicide notes with jokes in them (“she had tried a noose but couldn’t get the hang of it”).
Some stories flicker with grungy late-night glamour, others are saturated with weighty sadness. Most are shot through with the sharpest humour, and all contain wincingly accurate observation. “My Jockey,” set on an Accident and Emergency ward, fizzes with compassionate warmth and unsettling Freudian nuance, exploring the transformative, humbling effects of catastrophic injury. It’s impossible to know where you’ll wash up by the end of each story, and this magnificent treasury of her work is a revelation.
