A Meaningful Life

By L. J. Davis
Introduction by Jonathan Lethem

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.

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Reviews

The story, delivered with terrific brio, proceeds as a phantasmagoria of urban decay and heightened obsession. It is also extremely funny if you can put politically correct scruples to the side — which should be easy enough as the true butt of the novel is Lowell himself.
— Katherine Powers, The Boston Globe

L.J. Davis's deadpan 1971 novel… is pure chaos, as Lowell confronts a cast of urban squatters, in some of the most brilliant comic turns this side of Alice in Wonderland. A cathartic read for urban pioneers.
— O, The Oprah Magazine

He has an unerring 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

[A novel that] has the authentically crazy tintinnabulation of our times... Mr. Blandings in a situation comedy by Kafka.
— Book World

Mr. Davis's book is the grotesque comedy of a city dweller's effort to will himself a meaningful life by purchasing a collapsing ruin, driving out the wretches who still cling to its rotted timbers, and restoring it as a monument to himself. He wants to be the house. But, as Davis's novel tells us, nobody beats the system because we are the system. He has a fine comic gift; a clear-eyed view of those who imagine that mere accumulation is life itself.
— Paula Fox

Davis is seen by some as a kind of Evelyn Waugh of the American urban crisis.
— The Washington Post

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