D. J. Waldie is an essayist, memoirist, translator, and editor who also is the former Deputy City Manager of Lakewood, California.

Although best known for Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Waldie also is regarded as a thoughtful observer of the history, politics, and culture of Los Angeles. "Nobody 'sees' L.A. with more eloquence than D. J. Waldie," noted Susan Brenneman, Los Angeles Times Deputy Op-Ed Editor, in May 2014. "Waldie ... is one of the writers responsible for developing a Southern California aesthetic in which what's most vivid about the place is everything we might take for granted somewhere else," said David Ulin, book critic of the Los Angeles Times in April 2014. [1]

Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

Waldie's Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir is an account of growing up in the 1950s in Lakewood, then California's largest planned suburb. [2] Lakewood was the first of its kind on the West Coast and is regarded [3] as a parallel to Levittown, New York, the original, post-World War II, tract-house development in America.

Waldie breaks the text of Holy Land into 316 sections, some no longer than a sentence or two. Some deal with the author's experiences, both in first and third person narration. These memories concentrate on his Catholic upbringing and the deaths of his parents. The majority of the sections detail the historical, geographical, political, and cultural factors both preceding the development of Lakewood's 17,000 homes and following Lakewood's incorporation as a city in 1954.

Waldie focuses particularly on the three developers who built Lakewood in the early 1950s, devoting long passages to the intricacies of the development process. Other passages consider how suburban places have been viewed by their critics, with particular reference to the aerial photographs of William A. Garnett. [4] Holy Land ultimately is a memoir of both a person and a place.

Critical reception of Holy Land

Holy Land received generally positive reviews on its publication in 1996, [6] although some critics were unimpressed by Waldie's fragmentary style and his thoughtful appreciation of suburban lives.

Novelist and memoirist Joan Didion described Holy Land as "Infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original." Dr. Kevin Starr, historian and author of the series Americans and the California Dream said, "I have read hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more, memoirs of California. Holy Land ranks with the best of them. With spare fact, Waldie has managed to present the rise of suburban Southern California in its full complexity."

In her review in the New York Times in July 1996, Michiko Kakutani concluded, "Moving back and forth effortlessly between the personal and the communal, between memories of his own childhood and statistics combed from public records, (Waldie) creates a moving portrait of his hometown, and in doing so he manages to give this faceless suburb, long held up as an archetype of suburban anonymity, a local habitation and a name." [7]

"Holy Land captivated me when it first came out. It still astonishes. It's no easier to describe now than it was before it became a classic of American autobiography. Waldie's range is staggering – from intimate, touchingly respectful revelations of family life and spiritual reality to a precise history of land development and public policy regarding water use (and don't imagine this is the boring part). Waldie has written nothing less than the spiritual autobiography of the midcentury American suburban dream. It proves to be a subject worthy of tragedy and of his remarkable elegy," wrote Patricia Hampl, novelist, memoirist, and poet in 2008 in Commonweal. [8]

Essayist and music critic Joe Bonomo, writing in the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry, described Holy Land in 2010 as "a lyric map -- if such a thing can be said to exist. Waldie's worked in a civic position in L.A. for decades, and his sometimes-fragmentary memories of growing up in mid-century suburban Los Angeles dovetail with accurate and clinical reportage of the area's tract history in 316 poetically arranged segments that suggest nothing less than an aerial view of a suburban neighborhood captured in reverie." [9]

Holy Land was called one of the 25 most significant books on Southern California architecture and urbanism by Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, in 2012. [10]

"If Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo had collaborated on a study of an archetypal American postwar suburb, the result would be D. J. Waldie's visionary history and memoir of Lakewood, California," said Robert Fishman, professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, in 2013. [11]

Novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer, interviewed by the New York Times Book Review in 2016, was more critical. "(A) number of people recommended D. J. Waldie's Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, he said, "but I found it so flat and dull." [12]

In 2018, James Mustich, Jr. included Holy Land in his compendium 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, noting "Although it's labeled as such, to call (Holy Land) a memoir does not quite do justice to the magic it works, invoking the numinous in the anonymous through an almost sacramental act of attention." [13]

More recently, Eula Biss, writing in The Guardian, said of Holy Land, "This work invites the reader to consider how our lives are shaped by the structures we live within, and to wonder what it might mean to live a 'good life', in both material and spiritual terms." [14]

Scholarly appraisal

"The aesthetic appeal of D. J. Waldie's Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir may be attributed to the many surprises its hybrid form delivers. What sets off this little book from so many other narratives about the American post-war history of suburbanization is the complexity of its literary shape. … Holy Land presents a series of fragmented observations formally modeled upon the grid pattern that structures the author's built environment. Roaming across this grid is a walking participant observer: the narrator, who decentres the Cartesian eye of the cartographer. This laconic narrator plays around in a metonymical manner with an endlessly extendable chain of links, disturbing all attempts at reducing and synthesizing his suburban narrative. In the end, however, neither the act of gridding the text nor the insertion of a walking perspective lend themselves to straightforward allegorical interpretations. We are left with an unpredictable stage for the circulation and mutual transformation of information and affect, which in the final analysis appears to be a textual enactment of the workings of desire."

     – Bart Eeckhout and Lesley Janssen. "Making the Visible a Little Hard to See: D. J. Waldie's Aesthetic Challenge to American Urban Studies in Holy Land," Anglia: Journal of English Philology, Volume 132, Issue 1, April 2014, 78-97.

"Waldie challenges representations of suburbia as a type of region unworthy of serious, close attention, proving that regionalist study can be critical too, interrogating the local and proximate precisely in order to demonstrate its universality, its connectedness and its differences with the wider world."

     – Neil Campbell. "Affective Critical Regionalism in D. J. Waldie's Suburban West," Beyond the Myth: New Perspectives on Western Texts, editors D. Rio, A. Ibarraran, and M. Simonson, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain: Portal Education, 2011, 87-106.

Bests

In 2004, his essay collection Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The anthology Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (to which he contributed) was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2006 by National Public Radio, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Kansas City Star. California Romantica (for which he wrote the descriptive text) became a Los Angeles Times bestseller in 2007. Blue Sky Metropolis : The Aerospace Century in Southern California (to which he contributed) was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2012 by the Los Angeles Public Library.

In 2023, Holy Land was named one of the Los Angeles Times “26 absolute best LA books of all time.”

Translation

Waldie’s work as a translator of the 19th century, French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés / A Throw of the Dice was included in exhibitions at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Langson Library at the University of California Irvine, the Clark Humanities Museum at Scripps College and at the Mallarmé centenary symposium held at the City University of New York.

His translation is in the collections of the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as the special collections of the Princeton, Brown, UCLA, USC, Yale, and Harvard libraries. This translation was reprinted, along with a brief analysis of the poem, in Parnassus: Poetry in Review in 2005.

Awards

2017 William R. and June Dale Prize for Urban and Regional Planning, an endowed award administered by California State Polytechnic University, Pomona through the university's Department of Urban and Regional Planning. USC Professor Dowell Myers was the co-recipient of the 2017 Dale Prize.

2014 J. Thomas Owen History Award, Los Angeles City Historical Society

1998 Whiting Award, Whiting Foundation

1995 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship

1994 California Arts Council fellowship

References

1.    Ulin, David (28 January 2014). "Bernard Cooper's portrait of the artist as a young man". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 14 February 2021.

2.   "The Lakewood Story". Lakewood Online. City of Lakewood. Retrieved 6 June 2015.

3.   See, for example, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963, Kevin Starr, Oxford University Press, 2011

4.   Waldie, D. J. "Beautiful and Terrible". Places Journal. Retrieved 6 June 2015.

5.   "101 Books About Where and How We Live". Curbed. Retrieved 5 May 2016.

6.   Crawford, Margaret (August 25, 1996). "Suburban Graceland : Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 6 May 2017.

7.   Kakutani, Michiko (July 5, 1996). "Rooted in Suburbia, Body and Soul". New York Times. Retrieved 6 June 2015.

8.   Hampl, Patricia (June 6, 2008). "Summer Reading". Commonweal Magazine. Retrieved 19 January 2019.

9.   Bonomo, Joe. "Hyphen. Sketching the Bridge With Invisible Ink". Retrieved 14 December 2017.

10.  Hawthorne, Christopher (31 July 2011). "Reading L.A.: D.J. Waldie's spare, poetic 'Holy Land'". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 21 January 2019.

11.  Fishman, Robert (2005). "Review: Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir by D. J. Waldie". Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Retrieved 17 February 2021.

12.  Dyer, Geoff (30 June 2016). "Geoff Dyer: By the Book". New York Times. Retrieved 26 June 2016.

13.  Mustich, James, 1,000 Books To Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List, Workman Publishing, New York, 2018, p. 829

14.  Biss, Eula (13 January 2021). "Top 10 unconventional essays". The Guardian. Retrieved 13 January 2021.