Hijuelos paints a biography of a career, beginning with the necessity for Lydia to become a cleaning lady, and ends with the termination of her employment. In the middle, the events of her life and the lives of those around her are recounted in relation to her work. It is through the use of this framework that Hijuelos is able to portray a wide spectrum of people for Lydia to meet.

Hijuelos focuses on Lydia, yet uses a third person narrator to relate things that Lydia would not divulge herself as a narrator, and allows Hijuelos to explore the thoughts and feelings of other characters as well, to gauge Lydia's effect on others, to a great extent.

The subject matter of the novel comes from the long history of social realism, with the impact of the more recent opening of the literary world to stories of immigrants, as...