Teenage Punk by Lucia Berlin

Sandhill crane.

Like a lot of Lucia Berlin’s work, Teenage Punk is incredibly compressed and feels loosely autobiographical. The narrator (very much sounding like Berlin herself) is a divorced mother living in a ramshackle farmhouse with her many kids. She’s looking back on a specific moment in her life, when her older children, Ben and Jesse, were deep into 1960s rock (Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin). I assume these are the “punk” teenagers of the title, although the label feels more ironic than literal.

The story unfolds entirely in the past tense, giving it the feeling of a fleeting memory rather than a fully formed narrative. Berlin offers only brief snapshots before hopping to the next anecdote and the prose moves so quickly it barely pauses to catch its breath. Before you know it, we arrive at the story’s central action: the narrator wanders out at night to watch cranes drinking from a nearby irrigation ditch. That’s really it.

One of her kids tags along (Berlin never tells us which one) mouthing off, correcting her directions, dropping an F-bomb or two. Maybe this is the teenage punk? Or maybe the point is that it doesn’t matter. The moment passes as quickly as it arrives and then the story simply ends.

Very little happens here in terms of plot and that's sort of the point. The extreme compactness gives the story a hazy, offhand quality, like something half-remembered but still vivid in texture. Berlin’s prose is, as always, smooth and effortless, and she can suggest an entire lifetime in a few lines. At the same time, brevity also limits the emotional payoff since there just isn’t enough space for deeper character development or a strong emotional resonance to fully take hold. Still, as a small, sharp slice of lived experience, Teenage Punk does exactly what it sets out to do.