If you’re discovering it for the first time, you’ll find that D. J. Waldie’s 1996 Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir is concerned with ordinariness, but in a paradox that emerges from his close attention to the quotidian over 316 nonlinear passages, it proves to be quite an unusual book. The first sentence: “That evening he thought he was becoming his habits, or—even more—he thought he was becoming the grid he knew.” Waldie starts in medias res with an unnamed character of what seems like not a realistic memoir but a surreal fiction. Perhaps a man is turning into a grid the way another man, long ago in the pages of another book, woke up a gigantic insect.
While Waldie brings us into a specific image right away, he goes on to transform this tiny, magical visual of a man-as-grid into something far more practical: “He knew his suburb’s first 17,500 houses had been built in less than three years. He knew what this must have cost.” It’s impersonal, at first blush, a matter of arithmetics. These numbers, about Waldie’s hometown, the suburb Lakewood in Greater Los Angeles, ground us in concrete terms, no pun intended. The man feels of the suburbs; the man is turning into not an abstract grid that could be anyplace but a mirror of the Lakewood tract housing where he grew up, a place rapidly thrown up in less time than it takes to graduate high school. The second vignette is only one sentence that seems to contain within it a universal sentiment: “In a suburb that is not exactly middle class, the necessary illusion is predictability.” This reinforces the earlier sentence—a grid is, by its nature, predictable. It must be, to satisfy its purpose. And yet, Waldie suggests, there might be something more about grids, about himself, that he’ll get to later.
He builds suspense from oblique suggestions and contradictions, and each sentence unfolds carefully from the one before. These reveals, which you’ll find through the book, are like gems—hard, bright amalgamations of the structured abstract and the lightly intimate. After considering himself at a distance in the third person, Waldie writes more personally:
It rained once for an entire week in 1953, when I was five. The flat streets flooded. Schools closed. Only the rain happened, while I waited at the window.
Waiting was one of the first things I understood fully. Rain and the hydrogen bomb were two aspects of the same loss.
We see Waldie there at the window, a five-year-old boy waiting to go outside into the plain, utterly ordinary streets he usually plays on. Wet streets for which a foundation was poured, a foundation that Waldie will later imply “restrained the ground from indifference.” The rain is referred to here not as a verb or an action but as an event, a spectacle, having nothing to do with the man-made construction that was earlier referenced. But into this innocent scene, a surprising grief is introduced—a loss engendered, in part, by “the hydrogen bomb” that the then–Soviet Union had tested in Kazakhstan in 1953. Not much further, we encounter the grid again. It is not merely a tool of construction but also a “compass of possibilities,” suggesting that the man who considers himself a grid is such a compass too.
Some of us are used to thinking of the spiritual as somehow spectacular, whether in grand ritual or an expansive feeling of possibility found within, but under Waldie’s gaze, it is the tiny and particular and mundane of Lakewood, and of the self who closely, with profound attention, attends to a perfectly ordinary place, that reflect a sense of the infinite. The suburb is, in this conceptualization, a holy land for Waldie.
In a chapter of his more recent book Becoming Los Angeles, Waldie writes about going home again. This return doesn’t occur because he has physically left the Lakewood house he grew up in, he explains, but because he’s coming home to the long-ago self who wrote Holy Land. He’s been asked to draft a screenplay that would translate the experience of perusing his memoir to the screen, and he reenters the old self, the one who found consolation in writing the memoir, to do so.
Waldie shares that over the three decades since he wrote Holy Land, he’s discussed the book with all sorts of audiences, performing “the part of the man who wrote that book.” Describing his earlier self in the third person, the earlier man who thought himself a grid, a compass, Waldie delightfully unmakes our expectations about place once again. He muses, “What angered him, it turns out, still angers me: the way in which ordinariness is held in contempt by some of us. What he loved then I find that I love even more now. (And I’m grateful.)”•
Join us on January 18 at 5 p.m., when Waldie will appear with special guest Lawrence Weschler and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
Unfortunately, Holy Land has fallen out of print. Please buy the book from Alibris or a local used bookstore of your choice.
EXCERPT
Read several early nonlinear passages from Holy Land to get a feel for the book. —Alta
JANUARY RELEASES
Here are 12 new books by authors from the West that we’re excited about this month. —Alta
EVENT RECAP
If you missed the event with Carribean Fragoza last month, read the recap or watch the video. —Alta
VELVETY RELIEF
CBC host John Freeman writes about Fragoza’s imagistic collection of contagion plots. —Alta
SAN GABRIEL BOOKS
Alta Journal editorial assistant Elizabeth Casillas writes about books, like Fragoza’s, that have emerged from El Monte and South El Monte in the San Gabriel Valley. —Alta
’90s RAVE SCENE
Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith writes about her experience of Bay Area raves. —Alta
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