His book will remind readers simultaneously of such disparate works as Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," Reyner Banham's "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" and Joan Didion's "Play It as It Lays." Waldie tells his story in 316 staccato takes, some of them only a sentence or two long. Writing in quick, translucent prose that's both highly specific and strangely elliptical, Mr. Waldie - a city official in Lakewood - writes of his own life in that Los Angeles suburb, conjuring up its emotional and physical geography, as well as its history and the history of that slice of California, shaped by battles over land and water. In his odd and oddly moving new memoir, "Holy Land," D. Suburbia as a grid of right angles, suburbia as life in a honeycomb, suburbia as a horizonless cemetery, orderly, stultifying and well groomed. Though you may have never heard of Lakewood, Calif., you will instantly recognize photographs of it: photographs taken from the air, showing rows upon rows of identical houses, each of them bounded by identical yards and identical streets.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |