Welcome Home and Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin review – a wealth of lived experience

The American writer’s reputation continues to grow with the publication of a further short-story collection, and an intriguing memoir

Rooms are invariably rundown in Lucia Berlin’s stories. You are led into them briskly, without any caveat, and so you expect a degree of familiarity. But things are never as they seem. 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. Water from a toilet upstairs drips through the chandelier in a New York apartment. 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”. It isn’t just the rooms; the people in them, too, seem out of sorts. A girl decides to do nothing as her pampered younger sister is molested by their grandfather. An addict in rehab kills a pack of stray dogs. 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.”

The Berlin revival is welcome but curious. 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. 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. Her background was very different from the minimalists she is now inevitably grouped with.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Vif1iG

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