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25 pages 50 minutes read

Anne Tyler

Teenage Wasteland

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1983

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Symbols & Motifs

“Teenage Wasteland”

“Teenage Wasteland” is both the title of the story and an allusion to a line out of The Who’s 1971 song “Baba O’Riley.” The meaning of that particular line is in dispute, but the song’s appearance as Donny and other teens socialize under Cal’s basketball net implies that Cal’s vision of free teens throwing off the restrictions of adult authority is unlikely to yield happiness for the teens. The title of the song appears just over halfway through the story, coming at a pivotal moment when Daisy realizes that Cal’s interventions are not preparing Donny to lead a successful life as Daisy defines it.

Tyler describes Donny as “excited and jittery” (Paragraph 61) during this scene, so the song might also be an oblique reference to drinking or drug use by Donny. The Coble family home, school, and Cal’s place are all wastelands because the adults who control these spaces have no vision of the reality of life for people who are Donny’s age.

The Basketball Court

A basketball court is traditionally a space in which a group of people collaborate to accomplish a central purpose (winning a game). In “Teenage Wasteland,” most of the teens do not bother to play basketball on the court, but it is where they experience a sense of belonging. For Donny, the interactions under the basketball net feed a need that is common to teens, namely, connection to peers. The basketball court is also a symbol of Cal’s efforts to create free spaces where teens can be themselves outside of the surveillance of adults.

Daisy and Matt, who believe in the importance of adult authority, see the basketball court as a place in which teenage autonomy has exceeded all bounds and become dangerous. Daisy, in fact, calls the other teens on the court “hoodlums” (Paragraph 61), with the implication that there is something inherently lawless about teenage autonomy. At the end of the story, Daisy has a vision of the basketball court as a barren place. For Daisy, the court is a symbol of the ineffectiveness of Cal’s approach and the loss of the possibility of connection with her son.

Cal

Cal is younger than Daisy and Matt, making him one of the sole symbols of young people who came of age in the 1960s. His casual dress, his easy manner with the teens, his choice of music, and his efforts to socialize with the teens by taking them to a concert demonstrate how he wishes to ally himself more closely with youth than the unhappy adulthood exhibited by the Cobles. Cal’s insistence that his clients call him by his first name shows that he wants teens to see him as a peer instead of an authority. His rejection of rules and authority makes him an important symbol of the values of the 1960s. Still, his approach to helping Donny proves as fruitless as the Cobles’ approach, with the implication that the world built by people like Cal is no more likely to make young people happy than what came before.

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