The title is, “You Are Always Somewhere.” Waldie’s new essay collection, Becoming Los Angeles, has a title that captures his immersive and soft-footed approach to the city, an approach that earned him die-hard fans over 20 years ago with Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. Still, when Waldie's style works, his empty front lawns are every bit as depressing as the real thing.ONE SECTION OF D. This isn't always successful at points his descriptions are too minimal even to provoke our interest. Waldie is perhaps at his creepiest when he turns his detached terseness on his parents and the woman he once loved, giving only the slightest hints of how he feels about anyone. One man complains about the red traffic signals he encounters on his way home from work: he wants the city to make them all green, all the time.

perpetually invents conspiracies that implicate the city, the cable company, NASA, and the fast-food fry cook who raped her. As a city official, he comes in contact with Lakewood's most eccentric residents his descriptions of them, factual and stripped of explicit judgment or commentary, are both funny and desperately sad. Waldie skillfully traces Lakewood's evolution in the context of the rise of the suburbs, tract housing, shopping centers, and the 1950s illusion that everyone could be middle class (''Middle-class houses are the homes of people who would not live here''). Waldie's flat, terse, and often emotionless prose seems jarringly appropriate to this description of an environment characterized by painful aesthetic monotony and emotional distance. (One can't help wondering how long he'll be retained in this position after the publication of this bleak and cynical book.) He has written a bizarre, often nonsequential, collection of anecdotes and observations on the oppressively gridlike layout of the suburb in which he still lives, city planning, flood control, estrangement between neighbors or between parents and children, Catholicism, and bureaucracy. Waldie is a poet, one of BUZZ magazine's 100 certified cool people, and public information officer of Lakewood, Calif.

Part memoir, part social history, this odd collection of reflections should resonate with anyone who has experienced the profound loneliness of life in suburbia.

Holy land a suburban memoir