Being made of myth and materials, the suburbs are a hard place about which to tell stories. In the last century of American literature, only a handful of good novels unfold there. Even fewer plays and poems. Shaped by restrictions, built on erasure, the suburbs seem tailor-made for horror films. Tales that turn the racial covenants and landscape destruction—that also made the suburbs—inside out; these stories typically speculate through monsters what all that control over the suburbs is meant to keep at bay.
There is, however, at least one great book to have emerged from the suburbs. It is Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, D. J. Waldie’s slim 1996 work, an orchestrally paced ode to the town of Lakewood, the planned city of 80,000 in Los Angeles County where Waldie has worked for the city since 1977. Unfolding in 316 short, numbered sections, Waldie’s book loops through the town’s founding, his family’s story, and the urban history of the West, mapping each upon the other with harmonic grace.
The effect of this weave is mesmerizing. It’s also one of the rare instances in writing—Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge might be the other—of psychogeography finding a narrative form that makes sense in America. Writing in 1955, the French situationist Guy Debord described psychogeography as “the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls...gives rise to feelings as differentiated and complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke.”
Regimented, planned, and patterned so obviously as to become (cheaply) synonymous with boredom, the suburbs might seem the least conducive environment for such pipettes of thought. The genius of Holy Land is to find a way to flaneur through Lakewood without approaching this task literally. So we begin almost abstractly:
That evening he thought he was becoming his habits, or—even more—he thought he was becoming the grid he knew.
This “he” is our guide in Holy Land as we tour through Lakewood. Our narrator, who is sometimes “I,” sometimes “he,” sometimes simply a transmitter of information, is a kind of one-man oral historian, collecting the stories of his neighborhood, the sensory details—dogs barking, jacaranda trees blooming—of living through seasons. In this way, he becomes a conductor of time, which allows him to move freely within a highly contained world.
And regimented it is. Laid out on a grid at right angles, each lot in Lakewood measures 50 by 100 feet (the minimum size allowed by the County of Los Angeles). Each house occupies 1,100 square feet. In front of each home, a 15-gallon tree must be planted. None of the species that wind up here are native to California. There’s a numerology and comfort to these patterns that is almost religious. “The sidewalk is four feet wide,” Waldie writes. “The street is forty feet wide. The strip of lawn between the street and the sidewalk is seven feet. The setback from curb to house is twenty feet. This pattern—of asphalt, grass, concrete, grass—is as regular as any thought of God’s.”
The liturgical qualities of such passages are not an accident. Waldie, who grew up Catholic, is watching a world be born and created so rapidly that you almost expect the developers to rest on the seventh day. There is a Genesis-like poetry to the assembly of materials, of people. The poetry of shingles and bundles, two-by-fours and tar paper, chicken wire, stucco, scaffold jacks, and concrete pours.
All this destruction to the earth and yet each house has a foundation deeper than a few feet. Add to that hollow walls—stucco on the outside, barely an inch thick—and one staggers at the temerity hidden within such an enormous construction. The builders didn’t have time. First homes went up in 1950, sold for $695 down and a mortgage of around $50 a month, more if the purchaser wanted to finance appliances, which many did. No one had any money. Built by veterans for veterans and others in the shadow of the bomb, Lakewood was a place too made in the lip of trauma to be called a dream. Looking at pictures Waldie has collected, aerial shots of the land, which had previously been bean fields, it’s hard not to think of sister images of Hiroshima after the devastation.
It’s another un-accidental echo. Douglas Aircraft was then the area’s biggest employer. While it was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress (the Enola Gay) that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, killing about 80,000 Japanese people instantly and many more in the days and weeks to come, Douglas made its own medium-range bombers, including the twin-engine A-26 Invader, which was used heavily in the Pacific theater. Surely, some of the town’s residents would have flown on one. Maybe even watched it rain fire on ships, island, people. But how much wants to be remembered?
Moving in counterpoint to the assumptions of constructions, Waldie paces the story of Lakewood’s historic development—the biggest planned city in the world, the biggest shopping center of its time—with anecdote upon anecdote of erasure. Some of the residents, named by an initial to protect their identity, go mad. Douglas gives the city a fighter jet with a Native American, possibly Navajo, painted on the side with blue eyes. The Korean War memorial in town has only the names of the city council members. Other monuments obscure the identity of the original builders of the town.
These juxtapositions power Holy Land, one of whose counterpart themes must surely be a riff on the desire for Zion. The three builders of Lakewood were Jewish émigrés. One, Mark Taper, came to California from Poland via England, where he made his first fortune in shoe stores and real estate. He was old enough to have survived the first blitz of World War I, when his father was injured in a Zeppelin raid. The other two, Louis Boyar and Ben Weingart, came to Los Angeles from San Francisco and Kentucky, respectively, putting up $15,000 of their own money, as well as many borrowed millions, bought in 1949 together with Taper the land that became Lakewood.
And here the historical ironies begin to treble. Looping back to Los Angeles history, Waldie reminds us that the city was founded by the royal order of Spain in 1781—and the city was purposefully separated from the San Gabriel Mission. The priests insisted on the separation, he writes. “They feared the effect of the secular town on their Native American converts.” Felipe de Neve, the first colonial governor, carried a map to the nonexistent city from Mexico City. “The book prescribed the exact orientation of the streets, the houses and the public places for all the colonial settlements in the Spanish Americas. That grid came from God.”
One wonders, reading Holy Land, if three Jewish men, standing on a landscape nearly razed of trees, made any connection to this long-ago map or to the state of Israel, which was coming into being at the same time several thousand miles away—not in a land without a people but in one where some 700,000 were about to be displaced from their homes. How many of the three knew enough about the Holocaust to find a mirror to their regimented project in Los Angeles in the right angles and regiments of Birkenau, which means “birchwood”? It, too, was built on farmland, and each shed on the land was, Waldie says, “36 feet wide and 116 feet long. Each had been built to house 550 prisoners.”
This is an astounding juxtaposition. If a reader was feeling cramped by the idea of these houses, side-by-side, the barbarity of that housing measurement in the Holocaust puts the project to build housing for the many (quite a few of them Catholic) into stark perspective. One that would have no doubt been at the forefront of these three builders’ minds in 1949. Indeed, Taper had dedicated parts of his then-fortune to bringing hundreds of Catholic and Jewish children out of Nazi Germany.
While a short film, Suburban Memoir, has been made of Waldie’s book, it’s not clear why a full-length movie hasn’t, because Waldie leaves plenty of space for a screenwriter and director to imagine their way into the space between this period and what is reported here. For instance, Taper, Boyar, and Weingart bought the land from Clark Bonner, the nephew of the founder of the Montana Land Company. As Waldie writes, “the Montana Land Company made it very clear in its promotional material that the lots were protected by ‘restrictions of an all-inclusive nature.’ Written into deed covenants, these restrictions prevented the sale of lots to Negroes, Mexicans and Jews.”
In other words, the three Jewish entrepreneurs were building a development that they wouldn’t be able to live in. One wonders if they had conversations at the time with the association of musicians and World War II veterans assembled to make Crestwood Hills in West Los Angeles—originally planned to be a multiethnic utopian housing experiment. Some of the homes, many of which still survive, were designed by A. Quincy Jones. Pressure from nearby Brentwood residents caused the make of the association to change. Still, many of the cooperative members were Jewish, and the idea of living collectively was the goal.
As Waldie points out in Holy Land, even if tight quarters and shared spaces were design features in Lakewood, isolation became the norm. Mixing his family’s story with those he receives at the city office, he describes people slowly going mad, digging bomb shelters beneath their garages, telling on one another in a constant low-grade war of NIMBYism. Writing personally, no doubt, he says one of the saddest things ever said about his suburb: “You almost never hear the sounds of love.” It’s a testament to the way Waldie shapes his narrative orbitals that such details do not entirely define “his city,” as he calls Lakewood. There are, of course, moments of beauty, of unexpected social grace—the naming of three parks after Latin American freedom fighters—and of sheer wonder at its existence at all, at the success of its founders. After all, William Willmore, who founded the utopian racialist experiment that became Long Beach, failed and wound up dying poor. When Weingart died, he was worth over $200 million.
How to live in the orbit of such history is one of the questions Holy Land raises without ever really providing an answer; rather, through example, it offers a mode of holding the impossibility of an answer. The book is in many ways a clinic in counternarration. Diverting through education and more, naming the mission projects so many California kids were made to do growing up, Holy Land does not let its readers forget what was erased for Lakewood to exist, without ever taking the presumption of claiming that what has been erased can be retrieved.
Part narrator, part time captain, Waldie is the mournful poet of his palimpsest city, striding through it figuratively the way Guillaume Apollinaire once did Paris. “If you lived in the old days, you would enter a monastery,” Apollinaire wrote of himself. Waldie, whose own family went partially into the cloth, has a similar aura. Meditative, archival, but possessing of a prose that feels written on foot, he has drawn an eternal book about a changing place. In this living map, he chronicles so much. The construction of his city, the unbuilding of his own family: First his mother’s, then his father’s death from heart disease. Then his own peculiar afterlife in the dry quietudes that live adjacent to grief. “You and I were trained for a conflict that never came,” he says, addressing all the other children of the Cold War. Oh, but there were others.•
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 Weschler to discuss Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
