Customer Reviews

A Meaningful Life (New York Review Books Classics)

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The first hundred pages of this book are among the best and funniest written about the "domestic politics of exhaustion." Lowell Lake quietly and desperately employs passive resistance in the quotidian war with his wife. For her part, she throws away his clothes and his birth certificate, tells Lowell that she hates how he sits in a chair, manipulates him into moving closer to her parents and wields casual cruelty like a rapier. In one of his few moments of insight or enthusiasm, Lowell blurts out to his wife during their relocation to her home in New York that he is the first member of his family to cross back east over the Mississippi in over a hundred years. Her response: "Big deal."

Unfortunately, the second half of the book focuses less on his marriage in order to recount Lowell's attempt to create an identity by renovating a broken down home in Brooklyn. He makes a game attempt but Lowell Lake is a man who has no friends, can't catch a ball and has so little clue that he prefers Linda Thorsen to Diana Rigg on the Avengers. (How's that for an obscure pop cultural reference by Davis?) Lake's failed effort lifts him almost to the level of a tragic hero but the reader remembers him more as the man who wakes up at night and intones aloud, "I am not a nerd."

This a quick and very enjoyable book. Read it for the priceless portraits of Lake's in-laws and for the new level of meaning Lowell Lake's existence brings to the word "meaningful."

Why is it we like Lowell Lake? He is hardly engaged in the world and seems to look down on all those he comes across as bizarre science experiments. Yet, we root for him and wish him every success as he struggles to find meaning in a life that has to this point largely just happened to him. Perhaps it is because he is finally taking the reigns and since he finds no reward in his work or his wife, we hope he will find something - anything. His wife, like most spouses, cuts quickly to the heart of his problem, saying, "That's just great. I can't tell you how that idea really grabs me. What do you think this is? The Jackie Gleason Show?... I have to travel three thousand miles and work my *** off for four years in order to marry a New York cab driver?... I don't believe it. I've never worn a house dress in my life. At least you could have said you wanted to be a riveter.... Riveters make good money and there'd be a nice little pension for me if you walked off a beam up there in the sky. I liked it better when you wanted to be a cowboy." So revealing regarding Lowell's lost boy persona.

The book also appealed because I love all things New York and am fascinated by the 1970's especially. Davis does a fantastic job communicating the social and economic forces of change taking place. Lowell's attempt to move from Manhattan to Brooklyn is almost voyeuristic. His encounters with the various characters are fun and I like to think accurate. The challenges that the renovation brings is at once pathetic, hopeful, and futile. The mansion he purchases and fixates on was built in the mid 19th century by a tycoon, Civil War hero, corporation lawyer, and adventurer. It is "the townhouse of Darius Collingwood, foremost corporation lawyer in the Northeastern United States," which impresses Lowell so much that his pursuit of the twenty-one-room Brooklyn structure becomes his quest and ultimately a pioneer outpost. The biography Davis invents for Darius Collingwood, seems so real and believable that I expect The Bowery Boy's New York History podcast to feature Collingwood.

This New York Book Review Classics edition has an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City and The Fortress of Solitude. His connection to the author is one of those New York stories that is great unto itself. It is an entertaining read and has turned me onto Davis overall so I look forward to reading his other work.

Lowell Lake is a fellow devoid of drive or brilliance. He grows up in the middle of nowhere--Boise--where his parents run a ma-and-pa motel that caters to the local b-girls, as well as the occasional furtive and worried homosexual politician. Lowell is smart enough to get accepted by Stanford, circa 1956, but not clever enough for a scholarship. He writes to the local judge, asking for advice and help. The judge misreads the letter as a smooth blackmail note. He's been having uranian assignations at the motel for many years, and decides the motel owners' son must know all about them. So the judge tells Lowell he knows of an obscure scholarship fund, and for four years pays for Stanford out of pocket. Lowell is none the wiser.

Nor does he do anything smart or distinguished in Palo Alto, where he fills out an English major and settles in with a Jewish girl from Brooklyn. He knows nothing about Jews or Brooklyn, but it all sounds wonderfully exotic. When Lowell finally meets the parents, he is horrified. The fiancée's mother is a shrill, angry woman who won't look Lowell in the eye; the father is a tiny, meek fabric-cutter ("Call me Leo") who main conversational topic is his terror of "the negroes." Lowell's impulse is to run away--perhaps live as hermit in the desert. He gets as far as Donner Pass before deciding he doesn't really have that much courage.

And so the dreadful, bickering marriage begins: Lowell's wife slowly turning into her mother and accusing Lowell of being "weak" like her father, Lowell feebly attempting to rouse himself to something dynamic.

They were supposed to move to Berkeley and follow the grad-school path. Now Lowell decides to show his nerve by moving to New York. He has no idea what he'll do in New York--maybe drive a cab and write a novel. "That's just great," shrills the wife. "I have to travel three thousand miles and work my ass off for four years in order to marry a New York cab driver? I don't think you know how bizarre that really is."

All this covers the first quarter of the book, by far the best and most inventive part. Most of the rest describes, in grotesque and fetid detail, the vast 1880s Brooklyn mansion that Lowell buys and proposes to refurbish. The basic stage-set changes from Lowell's cramped apartment to the tumbledown slum-house, giving ample room for a wide new cast of characters. Unfortunately most of these new characters are interchangeable extras--conniving real estate men, bums, various sorts of squatters and lunatics, and an army of colored people who drink out of paper bags and harass Lowell on the street.

Lowell doesn't so much do things as have stuff happen to him. His wife leaves him--sort of: runs off to her mother's, comes back, runs off again, may be having an affair, possibly not. Lowell kills a bum with a crowbar, splattering the bum's brains over the front room, and then tossing the body into a dumpster. But even this massive development has no consequences.

Plot is not foremost in this story; it is perfunctory, a bulletin-board onto which the author tacks his comic turns and diversions. Lowell's in-laws and wife, and the vast cast of others, get to show up and clown around on stage without ever eliciting sympathy or having any impact on the plot. Another welcome diversion is the biography of Darius Collingwood, the tycoon and adventurer who originally built the Brooklyn mansion in the 1880s (but lived there for a scant six months), and whose life conflates every half-remembered Nineteen Century tale of Wall Street scandal and South American freebooting.

The book's point-of-view shifts throughout. Initially the narrator is omniscient, knowing all sorts of things that Lowell doesn't. Once Lowell settles in with his cartoony wife, the p-o-v becomes downright claustrophic, limited to an ever-narrowing range of Lowell's consciousness.

The imaginative world of the novel is frankly derived from pop culture, mainly TV ('The Honeymooners' is mentioned once) and comic strips (Lowell thinks he looks like Henry Tremblechin, the put-upon father of Little Iodine). The Darius Collingwood mansion, with its dozens of rooms and layers of squalor, is an underclass version of the old-timey funny-page settings of "Major Hoople's Boarding House," "Moon Mullins," or "Right Around Home with Myrtle."

Recently I was musing about what sort of book would be suitable for reading on a Kindle. I think this one would. It isn't long and it doesn't have any pictures. The people are all stock characters without depth or detailed physical description (apart from Lowell, who is long, lean, and sandy-haired), so I never wanted to figure them out by drawing pictures of them in the margin. Neither did I feel prompted to scribble querulous notes and copyedit corrections. As a matter of fact, I didn't spot a single typo in the whole book. You won't find that kind of quality today.

Maybe yu have to be of a certain age to enjoy the humor, the lack of PC and the sheer good writing.
'A Meaningful Life' is about, among other things, the great American quest to fix things - ennui,neurosis, addiction, failing/failed marriages - by moving somewhere else and fixing something else.
I re-did (doesn't that sound better than 'gentrification'?) a Victorian house in the 70s. The frustration, the cultural clashes, the expense,the conflicts,the the Kafkaesque dealings with contractors, subs and building inspectors and the madness of it all rings hilariously true.
Davis is sort of a literary nephew, if not child of Nathanial West with a touch of Waugh to mellow it just a bit.
A hell of a book.
If it is not on your 'Best of the 20th Century' list you are wrong.

Some years ago I read Paula Fox's Desperate Characters.I liked it but thought it overated.A Meaningful Life has understandbly been compared to Fox's novel.I think it's the better book.It's funny and I enjoyed it.However it's not "that" good. I found it interesting that Davis was compared to Kingsley Amis.Amis is not in fashion now .He is a much funnier and more pointed writer than Davis.Davis' characters are wraiths .If Davis were as funny as Amis ,I might not find myself asking the question ,what is the point of this book? I have to say that is a question I seldomly ask but I couldn't escape the feeling that a book set in 1960 's Fort Greene(?) should have a point .There is something sly and evasive about this book .The fault may lie with the books amusing but pathetic protagonist.Lowell Lake is a complete jerk. His wife is a cypher .Issues of race and class are dealt with a great deal of irony and distance but I would say no depth and insufficient humor to make the novel work as pure satire.Davis lacks Amis' evil wit and so the novel winds up being neither fish nor foul.I get the impression he largely gave up fiction after this to write polemics.I can see why.