25 pages • 50 minutes read
Anne TylerTeenage Wasteland
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Rejecting Authority and Expectations
Based on the inclusion of “Baba O’Riley” (“Teenage Wasteland”), a song that the influential rock band The Who released in 1971, this story likely takes place in the early 1970s. If the 1960s were about the ascendance of youth culture and increasingly liberal perspectives on sex, women’s place in society, and race, the 1970s was a moment of reaction by people whose authority was called into question by these shifts and by the apparent beneficiaries of liberalization. Donny’s character arc most clearly illustrates the sense of uncertainty around what would happen once adult and societal authority were overthrown.
Donny is an elusive character whose motivations are not always apparent because Daisy serves as the focal character in the story. Still, his words and actions make it apparent that he has embraced the rejection of authority and middle-class values that animated youth culture during the 1960s. His truancy, drinking, and overt rebellion against his parents show that he has little respect for the values of an older generation.
Cal’s entrance into the lives of the Cobles merely gives Donny the vocabulary to talk about this rejection and a space to exercise his autonomy outside of the control of his parents. Donny might simply be lazy or have an undiagnosed learning disability, but with Cal’s help, Donny finally identifies school as a coercive, prison-like space that prevents him from exercising the full range of his teenage freedom. His disappearance from home certainly feels like a tragedy for Daisy, but it is also Donny’s successful rejection of authority. Donny liberates himself from his parents and societal expectations, and he is the only character to do so in the story.
Donny’s story is unfinished by the end of the narrative. As readers, we have no idea whether his choice to leave will serve him well or damage him. The rollcall of negative consequences for Cal’s other clients—“knifed in a tavern…shipped off to boarding school…withdrawn from school” (Paragraph 60)—indicates that the business of rejecting authority and expectations comes at a cost. Donny’s escalating problems with authority figures imply that he will continue to run into problems with authority and that the consequences for his clashes with authority will be severe. The lack of closure in Donny’s arc implies that the outcome of societal shifts that began in the 1960s is also still up for debate.
The Emotional Poverty of American Family Life
The teenage wasteland that swallows up Donny and his relationship with his parents is one that exists because there is no clear vision of what it is the Cobles, and Daisy especially, hope to accomplish with their parenting. At the back of that lack of vision is a bleakness that is a property of the Cobles’ lives.
Tyler references this bleakness through Daisy’s description of the Cobles from Lanham’s perspective as “[f]ailures—both of them—the kind of people who are always hurrying to catch up, missing the point of things that everyone else grasps at once” (Paragraph 8). Despite their ability to provide some material benefits to their children in the form of private school and an attentive mother like Daisy, the Cobles are not happy people. They are dissatisfied with themselves.
Then, too, there is Matt. Matt doesn’t seem heavily involved in the life of his family. He shows up for one of the unhappy parent conferences and is there to call Donny to account for talking back to his mother. His main contribution to the family is monetary, and he does not seem to have an emotionally engaging relationship with his son.
Daisy is not the most insightful of people, but she does understand that the lack of emotional engagement within the Coble family circle is at the root of their failure to maintain a relationship with Donny. This insight, achieved only after Donny leaves, is indicated with Daisy’s dream of the basketball court as a place littered with old leaves and “bars of sunlight as white as bones, bleached and parched and cleanly picked” (Paragraph 112). This is a vision of desolation and death, and it captures perfectly what is on offer in places like the neighborhood where Cal and the Cobles live—isolation and lack of real human connection. That this is not just a problem with the Cobles is made apparent when the police officers investigating Donny’s disappearance tell the Cobles that “[h]undreds, just in this city” (Paragraph 109) of children and teens run away.
The penultimate paragraph notes that the spiraling unhappiness of the Cobles in the aftermath of Donny’s departure is leading Amanda, the younger sister, to grow more distant from her parents as well. The implication is that the family as envisioned by Daisy’s generation is incapable of rearing whole children who can function in society.
Traditional Parenting Versus Permissive Parenting
The Cobles’ failure to maintain a relationship with Donny happens in part because the primary parent, Daisy, is caught between at least two notions of parenting: traditional parenting and permissive parenting.
In the Coble household, Daisy is responsible for direct interaction with her children. Daisy’s ideas about what it means to be a good parent shift repeatedly in the narrative. As a parent, Daisy is first motivated by her own childhood. She recalls that “[s]he had a miserable adolescence herself and had always sworn that no child of hers would ever be that unhappy” (Paragraph 41). While there is little further detail about Daisy’s parents, the lack of concern about the interior lives of children was the hallmark of traditional parenting styles in which parents did not necessarily see children as people in their own right. Daisy reveals that her desire to make her child happy and content with himself led her to heap excessive praise on Donny, even when such praise was not merited. She is a permissive parent in some instances.
On the other hand, Daisy has also internalized ideas about the importance of following rules and providing structure for children. Hers is a household in which Donny had a curfew for much of his adolescence and in which homework must be done before leisure time. In addition, she expects Donny to do well in school and abide by rules, such as not drinking or smoking cigarettes. When Donny bucks against these rules, Matt supports Daisy in enforcing these rules, although Matt is mostly absent when it comes to the children.
When her rulebound, structured approach to parenting fails to get Donny back to meeting expectations, Daisy resorts to the help of professionals like the psychologist and later to Cal. In Cal, Daisy encounters an extreme version of permissiveness. Tyler includes The Who, also famous for their 1960s anthem “My Generation,” as the soundtrack for Cal’s engagement with young people. This choice telegraphs Cal’s notion of parent-child relationships as coercive ones that undercut a child’s esteem and autonomy; his perspective is classic, 1960s-style anti-authoritarianism.
Cal’s notion of “the whole child” owes some debt to child psychologists like Benjamin Spock, whose influential writing on childrearing encouraged parents to be more intuitive in making decisions about their children, to not be so reliant on rigid rules, and to engage children emotionally. This more balanced approach seems attractive to Daisy, but she never commits to this approach or any other. The call from Donny’s history teacher briefly recalls Daisy to her role as a creator of structure and enforcer of rules, but Daisy follows Cal’s permissive regime until Donny’s expulsion.
Daisy reverts to imposing expectations and structure on Donny after Donny’s expulsion from his first school, and this is enough to march Donny through high school and keep him out of further legal trouble. Tyler paints this return to traditional parenting as a failure, however, if the measure of good parenting is how happy a child is: Donny seems unhappy and fails to establish connections to others in high school. Daisy sees him as an “exhausted and defeated figure” (Paragraph 108) near the end of the story, as opposed to the “excited and jittery” (Paragraph 61) Donny she saw when she and Matt gave him free rein. In the end, Daisy cannot strike a balance between permissiveness and rigid parenting. She loses her relationship with Donny as a result.
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By Anne Tyler
