Western Writers

The Fiction of Lucia Berlin: An Appreciation

By Jenny Shank, 11-12-07

At the Boulder Book Store last week, I passed by the remainder table and saw a small stack of Lucia Berlin’s books there.  It’s November, I thought, the month she died three years ago on the 12th, her sixty-eighth birthday. It feels like she’s been gone longer.  If asked to name one under-appreciated Western writer who deserves to be read and discussed more, my pick would be Lucia Berlin, who was a true, uncompromising artist, in addition to being a warm, inspiring teacher and a great friend.

Seeing Lucia’s final story collection, Where I Live Now, with its simple Black Sparrow Press cover, stacked on the discount table worked on me like Proust’s madeleine, and I could hardly move.  It was near closing time, and as a bookstore employee rushed past I met her eyes.

“My teacher,” I said, my throat feeling thick as I touched the cover with my fingertips.

“Yeah,” she said, “there are a lot of ‘my teachers’ around here.” She gestured around the room.

“But she’s the one,” I said.  It was maybe a stupid thing to say, but it was the only thing I could think of to convey what I felt.  Others have spoken for Lucia more eloquently, such as August Kleinzahler, who wrote in the London Review of Books about the very book I was touching: “Berlin’s literary model is Chekhov, but there are extra-literary models too, including the extended jazz solo, with its surges, convolutions, and asides. This is writing of a very high order.”

The woman gave me a smirk, like I was only the latest in a long line of nuts she’d humored that day.

“Have you read her?” I persisted.

“I’ve not read that particular author.” Her tone that suggested she’d read most of the writers who were worth reading.

“You’ve got to check her out,” I said.  But I’d given up.  To her I was just a bookstore nut—I’ve worked in a bookstore before myself, and know well the category of weirdos that she must have placed me in.

But I hope to convince whoever is reading this right now to go over to the Boulder Book Store and buy one of those copies of Where I Live Now for $6.98, if you can, or find this or any of Lucia Berlin’s other story collections online or at a book store.  I guarantee it’ll be the best way you’ll ever spend seven bucks.

Lucia was born in Alaska and spent most of her life moving around like the gypsies she so admired as a girl.  Her bio in the back of her book explains, “As a child she lived in mining camps in Idaho, Montana and Arizona, but spent most of her childhood in Chile.” As an adult, she lived in various places, including New York, New Mexico, and Colorado, and set her stories in all of these states, but especially California, where she lived off and on with her four sons and eventually died, in Marina del Rey, near her family.

One of the first stories I remember reading by Lucia was her exquisite short-short, “My Jockey,” which won the Jack London Short Story Prize in 1985.  Lucia lived a rich, varied life, and often drew on her experiences for her fiction.  In this case, she wrote this vignette from a memory of when she worked as a medical assistant in an emergency room.  It’s such a perfect description of the feelings evoked when a battered jockey, Muñoz, is brought into the E.R. that I find it difficult to quote just one passage, but here goes:

“God.  I undress people all the time, and it’s no big deal, takes a few seconds, Muñoz lay there, unconscious, a miniature Aztec god.  Because his clothes were so complicated it was as if I were performing an elaborate ritual.”

Okay, one more:

“He quieted in my arms, blew and snorted softly.  I stroked his fine back.  It shuddered and shimmered like that of a splendid young colt.  It was marvelous.”

(You can read the full story on Tom Raworth’s tribute page.)

One of Lucia’s best-known stories was “Angels Laundromat,” the title piece of her first collection, which was published in 1981.  On rereading it, I understand why it’s so well loved.  The story of an Apache Indian she met at a Laundromat in Albuquerque encapsulates everything Lucia did well, including her gift for dense, precise, telling detail, as in this passage:

“Angels Laundromat is in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Fourth Street.  Shabby shops and junkyards, second-hand stores with army cots, boxes of one-socks, 1940 editions of Good Hygiene.  Grain stores and motels for lovers and drunks and old women with hennaed hair who do their laundry at Angels.  Teenage Chicana brides go to Angels.  Towels, pink shortie nighties, bikini underpants that say Thursday.  Their husbands wear blue overalls with names in script on the pockets.  I like to wait and see the names appear in the mirror vision of the dryers.  Tino, Corky, Junior.”

In this story of an intense, temporary, unspoken communion between an alcoholic Indian man and a young mother, I am most struck by Lucia’s ability to juxtapose highs and lows of experience with one sharp sentence, as she does when the narrator tells the Apache, who claims he’s a chief, that her first cigarette was lit by a prince.  There, amid the seedy surroundings of the Laundromat filled with people who are down on their luck and yearning for better times, the narrator flashes back to a memory that confirms at least in part the rather incredible remark she’d made to the Apache:

“Once I was on a yacht off Viña del Mar.  I borrowed my first cigarette and asked the Prince Aly Khan for a light.  ‘Enchanté,’ he said.  He didn’t have a match actually.”

Lucia achieved the same effect in reverse in another of her stories, “The Pony Bar, Oakland,” in which the narrator is reminiscing about cricket matches she’d witnessed in Santiago when she was a young woman, dressed in white, enjoying “cucumber sandwiches for tea.” The ending is too perfect not to quote in its entirety:

“At the Pony Bar I remembered feeling as alien on the green grass as I did on the bar stool next to the biker.  He had hinges tattooed on his wrists, at the bend of his elbow, behind his knees.
‘You need a hinge on your neck,’ I said.
‘You need a screw up your ass.’ ”

In many of Lucia’s stories, there is a character who remembers past moments of dignity and grandeur, or at least normalcy, while being stuck in the muck of life lived at the margins.  I think especially of the stories “Her First Detox” and “Manual for Cleaning Women” in this category.

My favorite story in 1999’s Where I Live Now is “Mijito,” which is told from alternating perspectives of a teenage Mexican immigrant mother whose husband is in prison and one of the employees at the clinic where the mother takes her baby to have his hernia operated on.  In this story, Lucia completely enters into the consciousnesses of both of her perspective characters and in doing so, diffuses blame for the terrible act that serves as the denouement. 

I love Lucia’s stories for this: how they present the facts and details and then stand back, allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions.  In her life and in her fiction, Lucia never judged people on the basis of their present circumstances.  She knew only too well how many different, disparate acts a life can have.

Rereading Lucia’s stories made me feel a little better than I did at that moment when I saw her books on the discount table.  I can hear her voice in the careful words, see the fictionalized version of her remarkable life played out before me like a filmstrip because of the abundant details she provides. 

And reflecting on my interaction with the bookstore employee, I realize how it was like a scene in one of Lucia’s stories, in which one character reaches for communion, for humor, for beauty, for something bigger and less ephemeral than a toss-away encounter, and another character cuts the first down, letting harsh reality flood in.  As rough as the lives that Lucia Berlin describes in her stories are, it’s still the fleeting moments of beauty in them that linger in my mind.

I noticed that in Lucia Berlin’s Wikipedia entry, which must have been written by some of her many admirers, she is described as “a major American writer of the late 20th century.” It’s true she is a “major” writer in the hearts of everyone who reads her work, but although she did have a story in the Atlantic Monthly, she published mostly in small, scrappy literary magazines like Brick and First Intensity and Fourteen Hills and didn’t reach as wide an audience as she deserved during her lifetime.  I think she would have laughed to see Wikipedia’s glowing description of her career, which cites comparisons to Raymond Carver and Chekov.  And then she would have been immensely pleased.

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