And "Waldie ... is one of the writers responsible for developing a Southern California aesthetic in which what's most vivid about the place is everything we might take for granted somewhere else," said David Ulin, book critic of the Los Angeles Times in April 2014.

[2] Lakewood was the first of its kind on the west coast and is regarded [3] as a parallel to Levittown, New York, the original, post-World War II, tract-house development in America.

Jade Chang, author of The Wangs vs. the World, said of Holy Land in 2016, "Waldie's meditation on suburbia finds the beauty in wonky detail and weaves a wholly unconventional narrative.

"[5] Holy Land received generally positive reviews on its publication in 1996,[6] although some critics were unimpressed by Waldie's fragmentary style and his appreciation of suburban lives.

Waldie's range is staggering – from intimate, touchingly respectful revelations of family life and spiritual reality to a precise history of land development and public policy regarding water use (and don't imagine this is the boring part).

[8] Essayist and music writer Joe Bonomo, writing in the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry, described Holy Land in 2010 as "a lyric map -- if such a thing can be said to exist.

[10] "If Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo had collaborated on a study of an archetypal American postwar suburb, the result would be D. J. Waldie's visionary history and memoir of Lakewood, California," said Robert Fishman, professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, in 2013.

… Holy Land presents a series of fragmented observations formally modeled upon the grid pattern that structures the author's built environment.

We are left with an unpredictable stage for the circulation and mutual transformation of information and affect, which in the final analysis appears to be a textual enactment of the workings of desire."

"Making the Visible a Little Hard to See: D. J. Waldie's Aesthetic Challenge to American Urban Studies in Holy Land," Anglia: Journal of English Philology, Volume 132, Issue 1, April 2014, 78-97) "Waldie challenges representations of suburbia as a type of region unworthy of serious, close attention, proving that regionalist study can be critical too, interrogating the local and proximate precisely in order to demonstrate its universality, its connectedness and its differences with the wider world."

The anthology Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (to which he contributed) was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2006 by National Public Radio, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Kansas City Star.

Blue Sky Metropolis : The Aerospace Century in Southern California (to which he contributed) was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2012 by the Los Angeles Public Library.

He was a member of the delegation of Los Angeles writers and filmmakers invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to participate in the Guadalajara International Book Festival in 2009.