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.
In Welcome Home, a new selection of her letters and autobiographical fragments, Berlin describes her time growing up in mining towns in the US; her scoliosis, diagnosed when she was just 10; three marriages and four children before she was 30; the jobs she had to take on as a single mother to finance her addiction and medical bills. She spent her teenage years in Chile; lived for years with her third husband and children in rural Mexico; was a fixture in the Manhattan poetry scene with Denise Levertov and Amiri Baraka; and late in life became was a popular creative writing professor in Colorado.
The stories in Evening in Paradise, Berlin’s second posthumous collection, are filled again with shabby rooms and shabbier lives. A woman in Texas spends Christmas sitting on her roof. Children during the second world war sell sweepstakes from door to door. An old adobe house in New Mexico has no electricity or water: “Field mice came through all the holes … drilled for the plumbing.” In “Andado: A Gothic Romance” a Chilean senator pursues his American friend’s teenage daughter. He takes her to his country estate one weekend and they read Turgenev’s First Love by firelight. But, after the affair, it is the older man who seems guileless – “I am trying to think about what I have done” – while the girl only wants to be kissed again.
The opening of the title story, which centres on Hernan, a bartender, enacts this elusiveness: “Sometimes years later you look back and say that was the beginning of … or we were so happy then … before … after … Or you think I’ll be happy when … once I get … if we … Hernan knew he was happy now.” The longing concealed in these ellipses doesn’t seem Hernan’s. He is not much of a brooder or philosopher – just “happy now”. You suspect the thoughts are Berlin’s, and she is setting the mood in her understated way, just as a singer might preface a song with some reflective chatter. Music is a defining influence for Berlin – it is there in the whispered lullabies, the drunken singing, the crack-addled pianists. Places are evoked with an itinerant regret that sooner or later one will be again on the road. Texas, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, New York: the US of her stories is also the one conjured by mid-century country music and blues, a land at once exotic and wholesome, bustling with one-street towns and crowded cities, but no suburbia.
Why did it take so long for her books to find a sizable readership? The letters published in Welcome Home provide some partial answers. Encouraged by the poet Edward Dorn, Berlin was already writing seriously as an undergraduate. By the time she was 24, she had an agent, and was published in Saul Bellow’s magazine, the Noble Savage. In 1960, Little, Brown offered money to option a prospective novel. Berlin was overwhelmed: “It is no help to be paid for something that hasn’t been read.” Her agent kept goading her to sign: “Put your face on the book jacket and you’ll sell a million copies.” It all culminated in a dreadful lunch in a New York hotel, at which the editor at the publishing house sheepishly admitted that she was offering the deal just to placate Berlin’s powerful agent.
Though she won an American Book award in the 1990s, Berlin’s books were brought out in her lifetime only by small local presses. This seems all the more a wasted opportunity given the extent to which her stories, no doubt because all of that lived experience, open out to the world. An American girl realises the enormous power she wields over her high-school teachers in Chile; pregnant women cross the border from Texas into Mexico to get abortions; a white woman befriends an Apache chief while doing laundry in New Mexico; a bored New York housewife starts stalking the neighbourhood postman on his rounds – this is far from the stifling mood of Carver, even Cheever. There is no wallowing, no bathos. Instead there is an acute and varied awareness of the meaning of America, both at home and in the world.
• Welcome Home and Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin are published by Picador. To order a copy of Welcome Home for £14.95 (RRP £16.99) or Evening in Paradise for £10.49 (RRP £14.99), go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
