SOURCE: "How You Look to Your Cleaning Lady," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 3, 1988, pp. 3, 9.

Freeman, an American short story writer, offers a positive review of The Newspaper of Claremont Street, interpreting the protagonist's dream to own a house and some property as representative of the human struggle against hopelessness.

When I was young, I had a weekly job. I cleaned house for a woman who taught homemaking skills at the local girl's reform school. Each Saturday, I scraped wax off her floors, vacuumed her carpets, and otherwise rid her house of dirt while she recuperated from what must have been a hard job of trying to make cooks out of delinquents.

One thing I remember from that experience is how you come to know all sorts of things about people when you clean their house. You see their efforts to control things, how messiness is fought...