Stories of the suburbs are often mocking or scornful. Look at these small, constricted lives. Feel the desperate conformity. Pity the lost dreams. There’s a whole movie subgenre devoted to suburban dysfunction. Some of these movies, like American Beauty (1999), win lots of Oscars. They make us city dwellers feel better about the lives we live, the hypocrisies we supposedly avoid. Look at us. We’re better than these empty vessels and numbed-out toilers.
D. J. Waldie’s strange, wonderful Holy Land (1996), a “suburban memoir,” doesn’t just fly in the face of such tales. It smashes their familiar dichotomies to bits. It squeezes 316 numbered personal and historical impressions into 179 pages, by turns mundane, sorrowful, quietly proud, and haunting. In tracing the story of Lakewood, a post–World War II Los Angeles suburb of gridded tract houses, parks, and a shopping mall, Waldie, Lakewood’s former deputy city manager, neither scorns nor sentimentalizes. Instead, he records and reflects with poetic precision.
“The critics of suburbs say that you and I lead narrow lives,” he writes, as if the reader is also his neighbor. “I agree. My life is narrow. From one perspective or another, all our lives are narrow. Only when lives are placed side by side do they seem larger.”
The best suburban stories, on the page or on-screen, are deceptively complex, affixing irony or self-knowledge to what may initially appear to be mere scathing social criticism. Take Revolutionary Road, the searing 1961 Richard Yates novel adapted to the big screen by Sam Mendes in 2008. This is the tragedy of Frank and April Wheeler (played in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet), average New Yorkers in the ’50s who move to a tree-lined Connecticut suburb to start a family and watch their dreams die. Frank commutes to the city for a sales job he loathes. April whiles away her days with the kids, forgoing whatever ambitions she might otherwise have had.
Here’s the catch: As April and Frank plan a move to Paris—where Frank will do an unspecified creative something—then retreat back into a domestic existence both tortured and predictable, it becomes clear that they would live quotidian lives no matter where they laid their heads. Paris. Connecticut. New York. The suburbs just happen to be the perfect venue for their smallness, the place where their silent scream can disappear between the hedges. In this sense, Yates’s suburban critique carries a strong whiff of irony. After all, it’s hard to blame the perfect lawns and fake smiles when you carry your misery the way a turtle carries its shell.
The only truly honest person in these suburbs is John, the adult son of the community’s busybody real estate agent. John is a mathematician who has undergone extensive shock treatment for his mental illness, a spirit stifled by his family’s shame and hyperconformity. (Michael Shannon plays him in the film and walks away with the whole thing.) John might actually be happier in Waldie’s Lakewood, where strange behavior, including obsessive hoarding, arguably becomes part of the town’s beautiful fabric, the answer to any easy assumptions of conformity.
Revolutionary Road is notable for pinpointing what the constrictions of a ’50s suburb might have been like for a young woman, particularly a young woman who, like April, desperately wanted to get an abortion. The Feminine Mystique was still around the corner; Roe v. Wade wasn’t yet a glimmer. This theme—the plight of the ’50s suburban woman—is adaptable even to sinister sci-fi. Don’t Worry Darling (2022) takes place in a dystopian West Coast suburb, where Alice (Florence Pugh) realizes that something isn’t quite right. The afternoon cocktails with her bestie (Olivia Wilde) are nice. The lawns are, yes, perfect, and the houses, laid out on a sort of circular grid, represent a suburban planner’s dream (you have to think Waldie would approve). But it doesn’t feel real—because it isn’t. It turns out the place is actually The Matrix in suburbia, a virtual reality dreamed up by men as a masculine playground where the martinis are always cold, sex is always available, and the women are kept in the dark. And what does this dream world look like? A ’50s California suburb.
The naked reality Waldie depicts subverts any impulse to indulge dystopian visions or Twilight Zone–like allegories. (The suburbs, incidentally, provided a feast for The Twilight Zone. Take 1960’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” in which a bland collection of suburban neighbors, walled off from the rest of the world, become a self-immolating mob when they suspect an alien invasion.) Waldie doesn’t need such devices to conjure his uncanny suburbia. He accentuates minute details of housing and neighborhood construction—drywall, crape myrtle, layers of stucco—with philosophical musings and remembrances that sometimes cross over into the macabre. “In the suburbs,” he writes, “a manageable life depends on a compact among neighbors. The unspoken agreement is an honest hypocrisy.”
Just as you’re wrapping your head around this—an honest hypocrisy?—he hits you with “Occasionally, an empty house will hide a hunched and blackening corpse, in bed, on the kitchen floor, or in the hall.” Death is never far in these pages; Waldie lost both of his parents as a young man and continued to live in the house where he was raised. Holy Land often has the texture of a ghost story.
This is a suburban study of matter-of-fact soulfulness and everyday imagination. It is, ultimately, an accounting of home. “Perhaps like me,” Waldie writes in his introduction, “my neighbors have found a place that permits restless people to be still.” But his spirit, his eye, his observational prowess remain restless. And the reader is all the better for it.•
Join us on January 18 at 5 p.m., when Waldie will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Lawrence Wechsler 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.
