In spare, plainspoken prose, Waldie remembers the suburb in which he grew up: the Greater Los Angeles bedroom community of Lakewood. Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir is made up of 316 miniature chapters that assemble Lakewood’s real estate history, starting with the postwar development of housing across 3,500 acres of bean fields and other farmland and continuing into the construction of department stores that anchor the town’s shopping centers and then the erecting of war memorial plaques and pools and golf courses. Waldie’s family became part of the town’s portrait in a time when assiduous master plans, perfect grids, seemed to promise that the California dream was the right of ordinary people. Read now, when housing shortages plague the state, Waldie’s memoir stands as a sensitive meditation on the intertwined effects of Lakewood’s growth on its residents over time; perhaps the suburb’s development is nothing less than his own.•
‘Holy Land’
D. J. Waldie’s memoir is the California Book Club’s January 2024 selection.
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