The prose moves in fluent, luxurious sentences, then picks up the pace, transforming into fragments, turns-of-phrase, exclamations, and quickly noted detail. Her stories jump through time with the seamless ease of a daydream. Berlin describes all this with an inextricable naturalness born out of great labor and technical accomplishment. In some she went in for twist endings you see coming a block away. Berlin is a writer you want in your back pocket this volume’s tombstone heft turns her into homework. This book would have been twice as good at a bit more than half the length. Each says the same thing many times (basically, 'Look how talented my friend Lucia Berlin was') while skimping on what you really want, which is context and biographical detail. The foreword by Lydia Davis and the introduction by its editor, Stephen Emerson, maddeningly overlap.
The title story, a near masterpiece, is told from the perspective of a woman who cleans houses, including those of her friends, to survive after her husband has died.
She was unusually perceptive about working life, a subject that still gets short shrift in American letters. Berlin has a gift for describing the intimate lives of her characters, many of them harried and divorced single mothers who have been, or are, addicted to strong drink or far worse. There’s a radical kind of transparency to her work.
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