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The Grid Life
While there are several elements of Waldie’s writing that I find commendable and even enviable, the thing that popped out most to me was his ability to further the significance of his story by his peculiar choice of style. His writing is abrupt, slightly chaotic, and cut off in to tiny little chunks. While at first this may look appealing, the short, paragraph long chapters, one soon realizes that the book loses an organic sense of movement because of it. Does that remind us of something he is writing about?
For me, it is clear that Waldie chose to write in such a way because of how it parallels his experiences with suburbia. The unstoppable grid wrote people in to an exacted and measured lifestyle. Everyone’s plot was exactly the same and was therefore repeated over and over and over again. There were too many different people crammed in to houses that looked exactly the same. In this way, Waldie’s writing travels from stories of death, to descriptions of subdivision politics, to poetic statements on life itself in little more than a page. His short chapters mirror the chopped up way of life so prevalent in early suburbia.
As his story suffers from an inability to grow organically, so too does the suburbs. But in this case, Waldie benefits from his stylistic choice as the choppiness of his story only enhances what he is speaking about. As for the suburbs, the repetition and abruptness of gridded-lot lifestyle does little to enhance anything and instead seems to stunt the growth of those who live in it.
I got a similar impression
I got a similar impression from Waldie's writing style. However, though I had difficulty trying the make sense of it and trying to put it all together, I also found it difficult to put down. Not in a I-love-it-I-have-to-keep-going sort of way, but more in a the-sections-are-so-short-I-can-probably-read-one-more-before-I-go-grab-a-glass-of-water sort of way.
I never really considered
I never really considered Waldie's style of writing as reflective of his topic choice but I really like your insight. There does seem something monotonous about the paragraph-style chapters as your flipping through the pages, similarly how when your driving in a suburb and you see the houses pass one by one without much distinction. But, at least, as you said, Waldie's book benefits from his style choice.