Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

Holy Land is about a grid—the planned suburb of Lakewood, California, whose small, identical homes were produced with conveyor-belt efficiency in the early '50s and where Waldie has lived in the same boxy house since childhood—and is itself a grid, made of 316 tiny boxes of memories, history, and observations about his home town. It's neither a celebration nor a condemnation of that often celebrated or condemned American phenomenon, "the suburb," but rather a deeply personal, but oddly distant, reflection about a particular place that's both one of the most mournful books I've read and in some ways the most generous.