Holy Land

Holy Land-D.J. Waldie

How I found this book: There are many books in my collection that I was forced to purchase for class. This one is one of the few I actually read, it was for a class on Los Angeles History I took at UCLA.

Setting: Lakewood, CA, late 20th century

Main Characters:

The Author: D.J. Waldie is writing his memoirs. So the other characters are various, people who come and go through the recollection of his memories. But the main character is actually Waldie himself.

Plot: The city of Lakewood is literally created out of an empty space. It’s one of the typical track housing neighborhoods built in the post-World War II era, when people longed for the security of the American Dream, and thought that living in suburbia would give it to them. Their lives aren’t as clean and assembly-line neat as the houses that they move into, and behind the cookie-cutter facades problems such as racism, marital abuse, depression, and isolation still are there. On the outside, Lakewood is growing into a suburban mecca, determined to keep itself apart from the much larger, multi-ethnic, and heavily urbanized Los Angeles, but still dependent on the larger metropolitan area for its own survival. And not all of Lakewood’s neighborhoods, such as the wealthy ones in bordering Long Beach, are particularly happy to see the influx of hard-working suburban types trying to inch in on their own idea of what it is to live the good life.

Themes:

Racism and exclusion: Waldie portrays a community in Southern California that is both inclusionist, in the sense that Lakewood’s largest population are Catholics and Jews, traditionally excluded in many nicer neighborhoods. But blacks and Latinos are not a presence at that time at all, (though I’m fairly certain that Latinos compromise a larger part of the community now at days). Furthermore, the rich in Long Beach deliberately segregate themselves from the growing Middle Class in Lakewood. There is a sense of racial and economic divide that still permeates Los Angeles to this day.

The failure of “The American Dream”-Waldie’s neighborhood isn’t populated by the Flinstones of the Cleavers. It’s populated with the woman who believes the government is digging under her house. It’s home to aircraft builders who worked till the day they died, never making enough to retire comfortably in their old age and enjoy their homes. There is the man who commits suicide, and others who find that the American Dream just didn’t quite work out for them the way it was supposed to. The suburbs are filled with the leftovers of those dreamers, watching as their children go off to fight in a war that epitomizes how the American Dream has failed.

The fabrication of American lives post-World War II: Waldie sees these suburban neighborhoods as places where people can live in pre-planned organization, a way of herding the American populace into order. The city was planned to center around a mall, the dry-cleaners and pharmacies were put within walking distance of the houses. Even the city ordinances had laws about what type of trees to plant and how to keep them maintained. But Waldie doesn’t just decry this as being unnatural, or forced, but as a way that neighbors in this planned community are forced to see one another closely, to see themselves for all their faults and accept it. People live so close together they can hear discussions and fights, neighborhood kids run together in gangs over the summers in order to amuse themselves, these forced lines created by the planners of the area are ways in which people can touch each others lives. But Waldie does note that as time goes on, these lines connect people less and less, and the community spirit of the neighborhood starts to fall apart.

Every book sucks somewhere: I don’t have a sucky point per se, really I do have a warning. This book isn’t written in normal chapter style, or in linear style. This is a free flowing piece, with chapters that follow chapters that don’t necessarily have much to do with one another, or story threads that bounce about from one chapter to another three chapters later. I don’t mind, I think it adds to the story, but if you are bothered by it, perhaps it isn’t a read for you.

What did I like: I loved that this was a very realistic and frank look at suburbanization in Post World War II America and what it meant for the average, middle-class American. It didn’t romanticize it in the way that books and shows of the period did, nor did it try to deconstruct it like so many other books and movies have done since, but tried to look at it through the very real experiences of someone who lived it and was sharing what they knew about and remembered.

I also like that Waldie did indeed go into the background of Lakewood, which I think is just as important as the experiences there. The historian in me likes to know why and where social-phenomenon came from, and to see that Waldie unflinchingly reports the political and social history of his city without romanticizing it really scored points with me.

How would I rate this wormy book: I’d give it a FAT WORM. Really only history majors and those interested in city development or Los Angeles culture would ever get into a book like this. But it’s a good one if you are, I highly recommend it, and it shows a small section of the ‘boom’ that LA experienced, (one of many), in the years after the second World War.