Holy Land

A Suburban Memoir

By D.J. Waldie
W.W. Norton, $24

ISBN 0393039579

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Review by Roger K. Miller

I did not grow up in one of those Levittown-style tract houses of the late 1940s and early 1950s, but in a small tenement apartment in a small city, so I have never understood the snobbish criticism of them as being boring and ticky-tacky. To me, then as now, they seemed good shelter at reasonable cost for people who might otherwise be living considerably more cramped lives in small dingy apartments in cities big and small.

Thus I was quite taken with D.J. Waldie's Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, one of two short books out this month that are worth even more of your time than it will take to read them. Holy Land is at once the story of the creation and growth of the city of Lakewood, California, and, if not quite a portrait, then a sketch of the author's life.

Waldie says Lakewood, south of Los Angeles, has been described as the second oldest "new" suburb in the nation, the first being Levittown on Long Island. He has lived there all his life and is now the city's public information officer, in which capacity he has collected hundreds of diverting facts about life in suburbia.

At first, you may find the author's style off-putting. Waldie writes in short, bare sentences in short, bare paragraphs arranged in 316 short, numbered sections. All I can say is, press on. Very quickly you will discover that the approach is appropriate to describing the development of a city of grids and right angles, where as many as 100 houses a day were begun between 1950 and 1952, eight houses to an acre and 46 to a block, each house 1,100 square feet of living space on a 50-by-100-foot lot. It has a lulling effect, like walking down suburban streets past 316 houses all the same.

Except they're not all the same, not then, not now, which is what the critics always missed. There are lives inside them, some of them quite unusual, as Waldie shows in a brief account of the activities of the eccentrics, obsessives, and mild nut cases he comes in contact with as a city official.

One of those lives is the author's own, lived in the house once owned by his parents, which he guardedly reveals from time to time in comments such as this: "The greatest loss in living deliberately alone is in not having anyone to forgive."

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Grafton, Wisconsin. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com

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