A Meaningful Life
  • Published: 15 May 2009
  • ISBN: 9781590173008
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 232
  • RRP: $36.99

A Meaningful Life

Formats & editions
EBook
21 Jul 2010
Paperback
15 May 2009
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L.J. Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life, is a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption through real estate and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Davis’s novel, heads to New York, where he plans to make it big as a writer. Instead he finds a job as a technical editor, at which he toils away while passion leaks out of his marriage to a nice Jewish girl. Then Lowell discovers a beautiful crumbling mansion in a crime-ridden section of Brooklyn, and against all advice, not to mention his wife’s will, sinks his every penny into buying it. He quits his job, moves in, and spends day and night on demolition and construction. At last he has a mission: he will dig up the lost history of his house; he will restore it to its past grandeur. He will make good on everything that’s gone wrong with his life, and he will even murder to do it.
  • Published: 15 May 2009
  • ISBN: 9781590173008
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 232
  • RRP: $36.99
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Praise for A Meaningful Life

  • "He has an erring sense of timing, of taste, of restraint. He has written some truly marvelous passages about New York. He has an absolute eye for the telling detail...An author who is clearly capable, funny at the proper times, both brutally and cheerfully perceptive." --The New York Times
  • "Somebody needs to revive the novels of L.J. Davis, mordant genius of early Boerum Hill. He still lives on Dean Street, but the books, savage documents of the brownstoner mindset, are forgotten...A Meaningful Life, set in Fort Greene, introduces a renovator grown so paranoid he kills a local intruder and hides the body in a dumpster." --Jonathan Lethem
  • "[Davis] has a fine comic gift; a clear-eyed view of those who imagine that mere accumulation is life itself." --Paula Fox
  • "Juicy, delectable, stylish, funny, frightening, and wise...There's not a page or paragraph that fails to delivery its sparkle of wit and observation." --Book World (Praise for Davis's novel Cowboys Don't Cry)
  • "A novel of comic encounters stitched together to form an urban nightmare...Mr. Davis has an eye for the monumentally ludicrous...perfectly calibrated dialogue." --The New York Times (Praise for Cowboys Don't Cry)
  • "An East Village bildungsroman that has a nice comic flair...Mr. Davis has an accurate ear and a keen eye." --The New York Times (Praise for Davis's novel Whence All But He Has Fled)