My mind this past week has been very much on the still-burning fires in Los Angeles. Though residents of Southern California are used to environmental calamities to a greater degree than most, my hometown is suffering in a unique way these days. News reports like to describe the burned-out neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades and Altadena as “tony enclaves” of the rich, which isn’t always true. Many of the homes in both places are of a piece with most of Los Angeles’s housing: modest single-family homes of two and three bedrooms, originally built for war workers in World War II or for veterans and their families in the years after.
Greg Erlandson, whose in-laws lost their home in Pacific Palisades, wrote in America last week of the community his father-in-law’s family joined in the 1970s: “The neighborhood he moved into was full of little stucco houses, small and cute, modestly remodeled, with lawns and flower beds. People who lived in this neighborhood expected it to be the last move they made. They weren’t rich, but they had a slice of heaven and planned to stay.” That story is shared by millions of residents of Los Angeles and countless more around the country.
Among the iconic suburbs of Southern California is Lakewood, a community of more than 17,000 modest homes (that in many cases required a down payment of less than $50 to own) built on 3,500 acres southeast of Los Angeles starting in the late 1940s. An early resident of Lakewood wrote a strikingly beautiful book in 1996 about what it was like to grow up there in the 1950s: Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, by D. J. Waldie.
I first encountered Holy Land many years ago when researching a biography of Fritz B. Burns, one of the master builders of suburban housing who transformed the landscape of Southern California. (Lakewood looks very much like Burns’s huge starter-home developments in Westchester, West Los Angeles, Burbank and Panorama City.) The book is divided into 316 short sections that cover everything from history to construction to sociology to religion to geology to personal memoir, all tied in to Lakewood’s past and present.
One glimpse of Waldie’s genius is a chapter of Holy Land that has stuck with me since I first read it a quarter-century ago: Ostensibly writing about a memory of the Good Friday services of his childhood, when he served as an altar boy during the veneration of the cross, Waldie is able to link the words of an ancient hymn—in English, “Sweet the wood, sweet the nails, Sweet the weight you bear”—to a reflection of all the weight that a suburban home can carry: lives, memories, histories and dreams.
Waldie earned critical acclaim in the years after the release of Holy Land. Joan Didion, who wrote a less than flattering profile of Lakewood in The New Yorker in 1993, called Holy Land “infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original.” The historian Robert Fishman wrote in 2013 that “If Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo had collaborated on a study of an archetypal American postwar suburb, the result would be D. J. Waldie’s visionary history and memoir of Lakewood, California.”
Holy Land captured the spirit of Lakewood but also many other communities beyond the “Little Boxes” stereotype of suburbs as bland cultural wastelands. Lakewood, in Waldie’s telling, is not a paradise, but nor is it banal or lacking in depth. If anything, it is a place imbued with sacramentality and moments of holiness, all taking place every day on its quintessentially suburban streets. The lyrical tone of Holy Land also made more than a few folks ask: Who was this new literary voice—a deputy city manager, it turned out—who wrote so beautifully of his own hometown?
Donald J. Waldie was born in 1948 in Lakewood, Calif., to Catholic parents who had moved to the area—then mostly empty fields—two years before. He attended Cal State Long Beach and UC Irvine. Before he began working for the city of Lakewood in 1977, he taught comparative literature at Cal State Long Beach and translated the works of the 19th century French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. He retired from his position as a deputy city manager of Lakewood in 2010, and has been a contributing editor to both the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Among Waldie’s numerous other books are the essay collections Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles (2004) and Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place (2020). The historian Michael Engh, S.J., reviewed the latter for America in 2020. “Taking Los Angeles on its own terms, Waldie assesses its successes and failures,” Engh wrote. “Another Los Angeles is now being invented, and Waldie’s book holds up a magnifying glass to what the city has been, is now and is becoming.”
Waldie himself wrote for America in 2019, reviewing David Kipen’s Dear Los Angeles:The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018. The story of Los Angeles “is a story of homelessness and longing to call somewhere home, of hungry migrants and the plumply self-satisfied, of killers and those they killed, suicides and births, of chance meetings and failed connections in a city, half built up and half torn down, where the dead are too often buried in forgetfulness,” Waldie wrote. “What other than all this ordinariness would ever make some of us love Los Angeles? And yet we do.”
In 2023, Waldie wrote an essay for Alta magazine on his calling as a writer. That essay also captured something of what many of us feel about the City of Angels these days. “I write about a tragic and lovely place called Los Angeles (not exactly bounded by city limit signs) where the habits of an ordinary life can be made,” Waldie wrote. “I’ve been told that Los Angeles is gaudy but inconsequential, a place devoid of authenticity. I’ve learned that it’s just as mortal as me.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “The Prayer of Unseeking Despair,” by Gretchen Tessmer. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
