Berlin on Berlin

I didn't know how to say things like "Do you enjoy studying the Belgian Congo?" or "What are your hobbies?" I would lurch up to them and blurt out "My uncle has a glass eye." Or "I found a dead Kodiak bear with his face full of maggots." They would ignore me, or giggle or say "Liar, liar, pants on fire!"
— "Stars and Saints"

I was the worst. If there was to be a test and none of us had studied I could distract her with questions about the Gadsden Purchase for the whole period, or get her started on segregation or American imperialism if we were really in trouble.
— "Good and Bad"

He shined the light everywhere but the road and I kept bugging him about it. Come on. Cut it out.
"You can see. You're walking along. You obviously know the road."
True.
— "Teenage Punk"

I don't mind telling people awful things if I can make them funny. — "Silence"

I know that it is true that Grandpa shot him, but how it happened has about ten different versions. — "Silence"

I don't like Diane Arbus. When I was a kid in Texas there were freak shows and even then I hated the way people would point at the freaks and laugh at them. But I was fascinated too. I loved the man with no arms who typed with his toes. But it wasn't the no arms that I liked. It was that he really wrote, all day. He was seriously writing something, liking what he was writing. — "Mijito"

I don't give a rat's ass about your feelings. I'm here to teach writing. — "Here It Is Saturday"

Because in the current critical economy even the most inspiration-free artist pushes wheelbarrows of kudos, it would be the sanest gesture in the world if you were to roll your eyes or sneer at what I'm about to write: sly and exquisite and effortlessly heterodox, the 75 or so short fictions Lucia Berlin wrote comprise a perpetual motion machine of wise strangeness, one of the permanent glories of American literature. She will remain in the pantheon long after Time has cast out the last false god or goddess. If Marcel Proust were American and female and wrote autobiographical short stories, he would have been Lucia Berlin. No amount of eye rolling or sneering makes any of my statements less true.

To initiate readers into the Cult of Lucia, Farrar, Strauss and Giraux has published a new selection of her work, A Manual for Cleaning Women. It's a superb calling card. Artfully selected and sequenced, its stories capture the arc of Lucia Berlin's life and the multitudes she contained: rich girl, abuse survivor, bon vivant, bohemian, fool for love, nomad, single mother, working-class stiff, alcoholic, American abroad, mother figure, and teacher (the multitudes, incidentally, nudge her work away from a pitfall of autobiographical fiction — a range of subject matter so slim as to border on anorexic). Plot details, motifs, and tropes interlock across stories, establishing tonal variety and thematic coherence. Taken together, the stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women form the self-portrait of a cheerful interrogator of the relationships between memory, love, and time.

A Manual for Cleaning Women draws heavily from Berlin's three previous collections, which contain almost all of her work: Homesick, So Long, and Where I Live Now. However, it serves enough fresh meat (excellent essays by Lydia Davis and Stephen Emerson, a brief biography of Berlin, and four previously uncollected stories) to be a worthy buy for those who already own those collections (which, I hope, the newly initiated will seek out).

A college classmate once tried to impress some sorority pledges by declaring Voice Farm his favorite band. Smiling at the confused and annoyed reactions, he explained they were so good because nobody had heard of them (back in Dinkins-era Greenwich Village even the finance majors were hipsters). I've never understood that brand of anti-fashion posturing; light should not be hidden in bushel. The appearance of A Manual for Cleaning Women is a reason to high-five anyone who cares about American literary culture. And so I say to you, don't buy a copy of this book just for yourself; buy copies for your significant other (or others), close friends, family members and random strangers. Spread the good word.

Oh, there's just one more thing. If justice reigned over the republic of American letters, there would already be a Library of America edition of Lucia Berlin's entire oeuvre, a fancy-Dan hardcover with selected letters and helpful annotations. I mean, seriously, the Library of America assembled a multi-volume set of Philip K. Dick novels, the cadeau juste for that special stoner college student or serious teen in your life. Slightly more puzzling, it wasted a volume on the selected claptrap of H.P. Lovecraft; the canon may need opening but, hell, you have to draw the line somewhere. Come on, people.