A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, by Lucia Berlin

Lucia Berlin, in the stories collected in A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories (2015), shows a great talent for description. It’s not merely the details she notices. It's how she presents them, the clarity of her descriptions, the beauty of her sentences. She's a good writer. Her stories are sometimes as brief as a couple of pages and sometimes much longer. Many if not most of them are anecdotes rather than fully developed narratives. Her method is to introduce a situation, develop one or more characters, and end the story. Usually there's no real plot. In some of her stories the narrative develops through emotional resonances and subtle changes in attitude. Some stories end with a kind of twist, a form of epiphany, that illuminates the situation or the people Berlin describes. She returns often to the same characters and situations, in part because she is drawing from the events of her own life.

An underlying motif in some of her stories is the approach of Berlin’s sister towards death from cancer. A group of stories are set in Mexico or South America, where Berlin lived for periods of her childhood and adult life. Others occur in Southern California or northern Colorado. They span a time in Berlin's life from her 20s until just before her death in her late 60s. Most of her main characters are women, although at least one story has a male protagonist. Many of the characters are recovering addicts or alcoholics, or at least they are recovering from failures in their personal lives. For the most part the stories seem to be autobiographical even when Berlin goes to some lengths to camouflage the characters. There is a novelty to the stories in their nuanced treatment of people and difficult situations and problematic lives. Because Berlin often reuses characters or situations, after a time the stories blur together.