D. J. Waldie

D. J. Waldie (Donald J. Waldie) is an American essayist, memoirist, translator, and editor who also is the former Deputy City Manager of Lakewood, California.
Although best known for "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir" (1996 and 2005, W. W. Norton), Waldie also is regarded as a thoughtful observer of Los Angeles' history, politics, and culture. "Nobody 'sees' L.A. with more eloquence than D. J. Waldie," noted Susan Brenneman, "Los Angeles Times" Deputy Op-Ed Editor, in May 2014. And "Waldie ... is one of the writers responsible for developing a Southern California aesthetic in which what's most vivid about the place is everything we might take for granted somewhere else," said David Ulin, book critic of the "Los Angeles Times" in April 2014.
Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.
Waldie's "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir" (1996 and 2005, W. W. Norton) is his account of growing up in the 1950s in Lakewood, then California's largest planned suburb. Lakewood was the first of its kind on the west coast and is regarded as a parallel to Levittown, New York, the original, post-World War II, tract-house development in America.
Waldie breaks the text into 316 sections, some no longer than a sentence or two. Some deal with the author's experiences, both in first and third person narration. These memories concentrate on his Catholic upbringing and the deaths of his parents. The majority of the sections detail the historical, geographical, political, and cultural factors both preceding the development of Lakewood's 17,000 homes and following Lakewood's incorporation as a city in 1954. Waldie focuses particularly on the three developers who built Lakewood in the early 1950s, devoting long passages to the intricacies of the development process. Other passages consider how suburban places have been viewed by their critics, with particular reference to the aerial photographs of William A. Garnett. "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir" ultimately becomes a memoir of both a person and a place.
Jade Chang, author of "The Wangs vs. the World", said of "Holy Land" in 2016, "Waldie's meditation on suburbia finds the beauty in wonky detail and weaves a wholly unconventional narrative. I'd put this book up against the best of Baudrillard and Banham."
Critical reception of Holy Land.
"Holy Land" received generally positive reviews on its publication in 1996, although some critics were unimpressed by Waldie's fragmentary style and his appreciation of suburban lives.
Novelist and memoirist Joan Didion described "Holy Land" as "Infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original." Dr. Kevin Starr, historian and author of the series "Americans and the California Dream" said, "I have read hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more, memoirs of California. "Holy Land" ranks with the best of them. With spare fact, Waldie has managed to present the rise of suburban Southern California in its full complexity."
In her review in the "New York Times" in July 1996, Michiko Kakutani concluded, "Moving back and forth effortlessly between the personal and the communal, between memories of his own childhood and statistics combed from public records, (Waldie) creates a moving portrait of his hometown, and in doing so he manages to give this faceless suburb, long held up as an archetype of suburban anonymity, a local habitation and a name."
""Holy Land" captivated me when it first came out. It still astonishes. It's no easier to describe now than it was before it became a classic of American autobiography. Waldie's range is staggering – from intimate, touchingly respectful revelations of family life and spiritual reality to a precise history of land development and public policy regarding water use (and don't imagine this is the boring part). Waldie has written nothing less than the spiritual autobiography of the midcentury American suburban dream. It proves to be a subject worthy of tragedy and of his remarkable elegy," wrote Patricia Hampl, novelist, memoirist, and poet in 2008 in Commonweal.
Essayist and rock music historian Joe Bonomo, writing in the "Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry", described "Holy Land" in 2010 as "a lyric map -- if such a thing can be said to exist. Waldie's worked in a civic position in L.A. for decades, and his sometimes-fragmentary memories of growing up in mid-century suburban Los Angeles dovetail with accurate and clinical reportage of the area's tract history in 316 poetically arranged segments that suggest nothing less than an aerial view of a suburban neighborhood captured in reverie."
"Holy Land" was called one of the 25 most significant books on Southern California architecture and urbanism by Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic of the "Los Angeles Times", in 2012. 
"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," said Robert Fishman, professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, in 2013.
Novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer, interviewed by the "New York Times Book Review" in 2016, was more critical. "(A) number of people recommended D. J. Waldie's "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir," he said, "but I found it so flat and dull."
In 2018, James Mustich, Jr. included "Holy Land" in his compendium "1,000 Books to Read Before You Die," noting "Although it's labeled as such, to call ("Holy Land") a memoir does not quite do justice to the magic it works, invoking the numinous in the anonymous through an almost sacramental act of attention."
More recently, Eula Biss, writing in "The Guardian", said of "Holy Land," "This work invites the reader to consider how our lives are shaped by the structures we live within, and to wonder what it might mean to live a “good life”, in both material and spiritual terms."
Scholarly appraisal.
"The aesthetic appeal of D. J. Waldie's "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir" may be attributed to the many surprises its hybrid form delivers. What sets off this little book from so many other narratives about the American post-war history of suburbanization is the complexity of its literary shape. … "Holy Land" presents a series of fragmented observations formally modeled upon the grid pattern that structures the author's built environment. Roaming across this grid is a walking participant observer: the narrator, who decentres the Cartesian eye of the cartographer. This laconic narrator plays around in a metonymical manner with an endlessly extendable chain of links, disturbing all attempts at reducing and synthesizing his suburban narrative. In the end, however, neither the act of gridding the text nor the insertion of a walking perspective lend themselves to straightforward allegorical interpretations. We are left with an unpredictable stage for the circulation and mutual transformation of information and affect, which in the final analysis appears to be a textual enactment of the workings of desire." (Bart Eeckhout and Lesley Janssen. "Making the Visible a Little Hard to See: D. J. Waldie's Aesthetic Challenge to American Urban Studies in Holy Land," "Anglia: Journal of English Philology", Volume 132, Issue 1, April 2014, 78-97)
"Waldie challenges representations of suburbia as a type of region unworthy
of serious, close attention, proving that regionalist study can be critical too, interrogating the local and
proximate precisely in order to demonstrate its universality, its connectedness and its differences with
the wider world." (Neil Campbell. "Affective Critical Regionalism in D. J. Waldie's Suburban West," "Beyond the Myth: New Perspectives on Western Texts", D. Rio, A. Ibarraran, and M. Simonson (eds), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain: Portal Education, 2011, 87-106)
Life.
D. J. Waldie lives in Lakewood, California in the house his parents bought in 1946. He was born in 1948. He attended California State University, Long Beach (then a California state college) and the University of California, Irvine, where he was a Regents Intern Fellow in Comparative Literature.
In the mid-1970s, he taught at California State University, Long Beach in the Department of Comparative Literature and the University Honors Program.
Waldie began his career in public administration in Lakewood in December 1977. He served as the city's Public Information Officer between 1981 and 2010. He retired as Deputy City Manager of Lakewood in September 2010.
He has written for the "Los Angeles Times", where he is a contributing editor. He is a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
His work as a translator of the 19th century, French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé was included in exhibitions at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Langson Library at the University of California Irvine, the Clark Humanities Museum at Scripps College and at the Mallarmé centenary symposium held at the City University of New York.
His translation of Mallarmé's "Un coup de dés"/"A Throw of the Dice" is in the collections of the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as the special collections of the Princeton, Brown, UCLA, USC, Yale, and Harvard libraries. This translation was reprinted, along with a brief analysis of the poem, in "Parnassus: Poetry in Review" in 2005.
In 2004, his essay collection "Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles" was named one of the best books of the year by the Los "Angeles Times Book Review". The anthology "Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape" (to which he contributed) was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2006 by National Public Radio, the "San Francisco Chronicle", and the "Kansas City Star". "California Romantica" (for which he wrote the descriptive text) became a "Los Angeles Times" bestseller in 2007. "Blue Sky Metropolis : The Aerospace Century in Southern California" (to which he contributed) was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2012 by the Los Angeles Public Library.
He was a member of the delegation of Los Angeles writers and filmmakers invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to participate in the Guadalajara International Book Festival in 2009.
In 2010, his memoir of growing up in suburban Los Angeles County in the 1950s was optioned by James Franco for a film project, released in 2015 as "Suburban Memoir".