January 25, 2024 : Wondercab Mini (59A)

A-V ROOM

A ZOOM CELEBRATION OF D.J. WALDIE’S HOLY LAND

Last week, former Granta editor and current Knopf chief John Freeman, acting in his felicitous side-capacity as the ongoing host of Alta magazine’s monthly California Book Club, invited fellow Angeleno Ren Weschler to join him in Zoom-ebration of the coming-on thirtieth anniversary of Holy Land, the well-nigh miraculous first book of D.J. Waldie, veritably the Augustine of Suburbia, the latter’s chronicle not so much of De Civitate Dios as of (actually, to hear him tell it, much the same thing) De Tractus Lakewood, the West Coast Levittown into which he was born in 1948 and where he lives to this day, in the very same house his parents bought when the grid of compact mass-produced houses was first getting splayed out across a one-time bean field, slotted between Long Beach and downtown Los Angeles, as a haven for lower middle class strivers.

The book—part documentary excavation, part elegiac confession; by turns historical, sociological, hydrogeological, arboreal, political, poetical, metaphysical—was the sort of thing you might expect from someone working as the public information officer of the town in question who happened, at the same time, to be spending his evenings translating Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’ abolira le hazard, except that in actuality nothing in this tight little book, made up of a succession of 316 mini-chapters, one following metronomically upon the next, was in any way predictable, even though by the end their gently pang-graced arc would come to feel almost inevitable.

Fans of the book will likely enjoy getting a chance to spend some time with its beguiling author; those who are only just now getting to know of the tract may soon find themselves eagerly tracking the thing down (lucky them).

In the meantime, here is a link to the California Book Club’s Waldie homepage, and click here to see the video in question (Weschler himself joins the conversation around 31:20):

See you next week!