A Meaningful Life Paperback - 2009

Media reviews

"... one of the strangest novels I have ever read: a crazed parable in which the protagonist, Lowell Lake, and his marriage undergo a constantly regenerating process of mental and physical disintegration. Quite mad, it can be read poolside, roadside or mountainside: wherever you are, you'll be Lake-side." – Geoff Dyer, The Guardian

"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

"Stultified by his job (editing a plumbing magazine) and his mind-numbing marriage ('a cross between Long Day's Journey into Night and Father Knows Best'), frustrated novelist Lowell Lake welcomes a new obsession: renovating a monstrously dilapidated mansion in a Brooklyn slum. What follows, in L.J. Davis's deadpan 1971 novel A Meaningful Life, reissued by NYRB Classics, 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

"A rediscovered American classic from the 1970s, this is a darkly comic portrayal of broken dreams." --Waterstone Books Quarterly

"Here's a real rediscovery...This strange comic masterwork is compared to the work of Kingsley Amis in Jonathan Lethem's new introduction. That's almost right, but the feel is darker, and there's a touch of Patricia Highsmith too; it's all about gentrification, and, ultimately, madness." --The Los Angeles Times

“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

A novel that “has the authentically crazy tintinnabulation of our times…Mr. Blandings in a situation comedy by Kafka.” –Book World

“[Davis] 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

Citations

• New York Review of Books, 12/03/2009, Page 48