Introducing author D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, the January California Book Club selection, host John Freeman said, “It might be one of the most exquisite pieces of narrative clockwork I’ve ever read.… It is a metaphysical map of Lakewood, California, the planned community of roughly 20,000 or so homes…that were built in the late 1940s.”
Freeman elaborated that Waldie’s book “is about a place and about a grid and about the building of that place. It’s also about what happens on the spirit level and the way that we need, or maybe perhaps sometimes respond to, aspects of order.” He asked Waldie to talk about these interactions.
Waldie explained that the book is an “intersection of a personality and a place. It’s also about the evolution of a certain kind of sensibility, a capacity to connect with a place that’s unprepossessing.” He compared the way the book unfolds to the variations found during a daily walk, where a single scene can appear different each day as it’s subjected to shifting seasonal effects and conditions like wind and rain. Even a place that seems fixed in time and circumstances, Waldie continued, is also constantly remaking itself in front of you. He expressed the hope that the experience of reading Holy Land reveals “how a pattern of encounters fills up a sense of place.”
Freeman pointed out that Waldie had long ago translated the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, “a poetry of order in some ways,” and used associative logic, similar to that of symbolist poetry, as “one of the forward-momentum devices of the book.” Freeman asked about the restrictions Waldie set for himself in writing Holy Land and whether those restrictions were liberating in how he talked about the death of his parents and other personal matters.
Waldie explained, “The book flows out of both a time of grieving and the limitations I have as a disabled person.” Due to his poor eyesight, he can’t drive and walks everywhere. He said that the “discipline of walking [was] fundamental to the making of Holy Land” but also set artificial barriers, including the number of words per section while writing. He used that strategy less because of his poetry-translation work and more because of the influence of poets he knew or studied with.
Freeman asked about the aspect of holiness and attention in the book. Waldie commented, “Holy Land is…an argument with those who automatically disparage suburban places…like Lakewood and with the notion that lives lived in suburban places like mine are by their nature limited, that lives in places like Lakewood are dehumanizing. And in the words of some critics of suburban places…that suburbs are the place where evil dwells.” He said that his choice of title is a bit of a thumb in the eye from a suburbanite to those who have a reflexive disregard for his home.
“It’s not a paradise. It is not by any means perfect,” he said. “But any place where your parents are buried is a sacred place and aspires to the condition of being a holy land. Any place where thousands of lives have been lived and aspirations have been realized, at least to some degree, is, in my tradition, belief, a holy land.”
Special guest Lawrence Weschler, a nonfiction author and friend of Waldie’s, joined the Zoom. He turned back to Freeman’s questions about the impact of translating Mallarmé on writing Holy Land. Weschler said, “You used to tell me about how, in fact, there was one page, but also a walk through a grid, you had to take each day. And that, in effect, the arc of any given passage was what you could think of in that walk…and that in turn creates an extraordinary metronomic quality.… All of the sentences breathe. There’s this regular breathing.” Weschler mentioned that at the end of the book, Waldie is writing about “the wonder, the marvel of how human beings are incarnated in a sense, in a place.”
After Weschler and Waldie discussed incarnation, Freeman returned to discuss the role of information in Waldie’s book. “The book is a superior piece of information technology. And it says, This is how information actually can be fed into the story of a place,” Freeman said. He asked how Waldie feels about the way places tell the stories of themselves. Waldie pointed out that Holy Land represents a kind of history-telling that’s radically different. The book is not a formal history but an affective history that derives value from being colored by the presence of an imagination and the author’s feelings; affective histories are informed by the sensibilities of the author.
Toward the end of the evening, Weschler mentioned a passage in Holy Land that reads, “Sometimes I think the only real forces here are circumstance and grace.” He asked Waldie whether by “circumstance” he meant chance. Waldie responded, “When I talk about circumstance, I really mean…contingencies. We live in a world in which we didn’t plan or prepare everything around us. We live at the mercy of contingencies…but we make a world that we can live in. We can make a world we can live in…from some kind of action of grace.”•
Join us on February 15 at 5 p.m., when author Dave Eggers will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Caterina Fake to discuss The Every. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
