Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir has been named one of the Los Angeles Times “26 absolute best LA books of all time.”
Ahead of the 2023 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the paper’s book editors and critics compiled the Ultimate L.A. Bookshelf: the 110 essential works that define Los Angeles. They started by surveying writers with deep ties to the city; 95 responded with enthusiastic suggestions.
Out of more than 500 works cited, just 26 received significantly more recommendations.
Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir was one of them.
The Critics
A singular work
– Colin Marshall (2021)
Infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original.
– Joan Didion (1995)
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.
– Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Book Critic (1996)
A classic of American autobiography
– Patricia Hampl, novelist and memoirist (2008)
Holy Land is one of the ‘25 most significant books on Southern California architecture and urbanism’
– Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic (2012)
One of the quirkiest, most original, most poignant books published in the 1990s, its inspiration springs from the blandest of muses—the American suburb. 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.
– James Mustich, author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die (2018)
More than anything I’ve ever read, (Holy Land) captures the torment and tenderness of the mundane and how that is shaped by our environment.
– Ryan Enos, author of The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (2017)
Waldie’s meditation on suburbia finds the beauty in wonky detail and weaves a wholly unconventional narrative. I’d put this book up against the best of Baudrillard and Banham.
– Jade Chang, author of The Wangs vs. The World (2016)
I love D. J. Waldie’s spare and devastating Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir for its formal discipline, and for some kind of magic it performs in seamlessly linking the intimacy of the author’s lived experience of his family home in Lakewood, CA with the sweeping history of postwar suburban housing tracts.
– Jean Walton, author of Fair Sex, Savage Dreams (2018)
D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir is a surreally realist chronicle of Lakewood California, the “world’s largest” subdivision built, overnight, in the 50s. Waldie’s memoir is built, like the grid, out of tiny bits of personal narrative, hometown tales, and moments in the history of real-estate development held together with the mortar or a singular, though widespread form of ordinariness.
– Kathleen Stewart, author of Ordinary Affects (2007)
The Scholars
Lyrical, surprising, strange and smart …
– William Deverell, Co-Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (2021)
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.
– Kevin Starr, author of the series Americans and the California Dream (1995)
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” (2011)
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.
– Robert Fishman, professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan (2013)
Holy Land, a sparse, yet pointed memoir … has quickly inserted itself into the canon of modern suburban and cultural landscape studies. Holy Land grapples with race, class, and the contradictions of suburban production while simultaneously demanding that suburbs—and suburbanites—be treated with a sense of compassion and respect.
– Alex Schafran, lecturer in Geography and Urban Studies, University of Leeds (2017)
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 (2014)