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VIDA PLENA, LA (B)
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 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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First published January 1, 1971
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November 12, 2020
Become the Dream You Want To Have
Lowell Lake is a nebbish, the Yiddish concept of ‘someone who, upon walking into a room. makes it feel like someone has just left.’ Or as Davis puts it: “a tiny, dim meteor in an empty matchbox.” Lowell is essentially invisible, even to himself, especially to himself: “in his eating club, he was the chairman of the committee that cleaned up after parties.” Indeed, he is always cleaning up... after himself. It’s not that he doesn’t care; he is acutely, meticulously aware of his ignorance: “he was definitely aware that something was expected of him. He wished he knew what it was.”
Lowell is comically hapless in the way we are all hapless: the reasons we pretend determine our actions are either rationalisations or archaic as soon as they are expressed. He gets to Stanford University by mistake, married by momentum, moves to Manhattan through a misunderstanding, and then on to Brooklyn as the result of a disastrous miscalculation; he becomes an editor of a trade monthly more or less by accident. Lowell exists in a fog: “A lot of things hadn’t occurred to him. He was paying for them now. Sometimes he wondered if he was even paying for things he didn’t know about.” Don’t we all?
Lowell is a reverse pioneer, returning East over the Sierras, the Rockies, and the Central Plains from whence his forbears came, to take up residence in a new kind of empty wilderness, a New York apartment in which “All traces of prior human occupancy had been obliterated.” He could be described as living in the moment. But that might imply that there was some excitement to be found in his attentive perception. This there was not. Lowell is, quite understandably, bored to tears by his own company. His wife by all accounts feels the same way about him. Their life of quiet desperation is as tense as that of any pioneer.
Lowell doesn’t really like himself. He believes that he would like himself in different circumstances. So, true to form, he goes about changing circumstances - thinking, drinking, clothes, yield nothing new. Anything requiring talent - writing, painting, and so forth - were non-starters. But the one thing pioneers are notoriously good at - moving to a new address - occurs to him as just the ticket for personal salvation. No training required. Essential relationships - work, home, friends - don’t have to be compromised. And isn’t this, moving on physically, the real All-American solution to psychological problems? The practical core of the American Dream?
So like millions of past migrants, Lowell up-sticks from Manhattan to that unknown land, that Lebensraum , that Canaan across the East River, that outer borough known as Brooklyn. In Brooklyn a man can be a man. In Brooklyn there was space and potential. Sure there was also criminality and organised gangs of natives, and political chaos; but that is the nature of the frontier. Brooklyn offered a (not overly adventurous) adventure. Through adventure one might carve a future. Or so Lowell’s inarticulate fantasy suggested. The fact that Brooklyn was also the place that his wife was trying throughout her life to escape from was a small hurdle to be overcome. What pioneering spouse had really ever wanted to follow her husband into the wilderness?
Thus unfolds a scenario that we Walter Mitty-types know only too well. The disappointments, the unexpected consequences, the basic unpleasantness of the process of becoming who we think we ought to be. On the one hand, this process demonstrates the pervasive tragedy of all human ambition. On the other hand, it is also really very funny to watch ourselves and our families gradually turning into our parents and siblings. It is certainly a remedy for that condition captured in another Yiddish word: Chutzpah .
Lowell Lake is a nebbish, the Yiddish concept of ‘someone who, upon walking into a room. makes it feel like someone has just left.’ Or as Davis puts it: “a tiny, dim meteor in an empty matchbox.” Lowell is essentially invisible, even to himself, especially to himself: “in his eating club, he was the chairman of the committee that cleaned up after parties.” Indeed, he is always cleaning up... after himself. It’s not that he doesn’t care; he is acutely, meticulously aware of his ignorance: “he was definitely aware that something was expected of him. He wished he knew what it was.”
Lowell is comically hapless in the way we are all hapless: the reasons we pretend determine our actions are either rationalisations or archaic as soon as they are expressed. He gets to Stanford University by mistake, married by momentum, moves to Manhattan through a misunderstanding, and then on to Brooklyn as the result of a disastrous miscalculation; he becomes an editor of a trade monthly more or less by accident. Lowell exists in a fog: “A lot of things hadn’t occurred to him. He was paying for them now. Sometimes he wondered if he was even paying for things he didn’t know about.” Don’t we all?
Lowell is a reverse pioneer, returning East over the Sierras, the Rockies, and the Central Plains from whence his forbears came, to take up residence in a new kind of empty wilderness, a New York apartment in which “All traces of prior human occupancy had been obliterated.” He could be described as living in the moment. But that might imply that there was some excitement to be found in his attentive perception. This there was not. Lowell is, quite understandably, bored to tears by his own company. His wife by all accounts feels the same way about him. Their life of quiet desperation is as tense as that of any pioneer.
Lowell doesn’t really like himself. He believes that he would like himself in different circumstances. So, true to form, he goes about changing circumstances - thinking, drinking, clothes, yield nothing new. Anything requiring talent - writing, painting, and so forth - were non-starters. But the one thing pioneers are notoriously good at - moving to a new address - occurs to him as just the ticket for personal salvation. No training required. Essential relationships - work, home, friends - don’t have to be compromised. And isn’t this, moving on physically, the real All-American solution to psychological problems? The practical core of the American Dream?
So like millions of past migrants, Lowell up-sticks from Manhattan to that unknown land, that Lebensraum , that Canaan across the East River, that outer borough known as Brooklyn. In Brooklyn a man can be a man. In Brooklyn there was space and potential. Sure there was also criminality and organised gangs of natives, and political chaos; but that is the nature of the frontier. Brooklyn offered a (not overly adventurous) adventure. Through adventure one might carve a future. Or so Lowell’s inarticulate fantasy suggested. The fact that Brooklyn was also the place that his wife was trying throughout her life to escape from was a small hurdle to be overcome. What pioneering spouse had really ever wanted to follow her husband into the wilderness?
Thus unfolds a scenario that we Walter Mitty-types know only too well. The disappointments, the unexpected consequences, the basic unpleasantness of the process of becoming who we think we ought to be. On the one hand, this process demonstrates the pervasive tragedy of all human ambition. On the other hand, it is also really very funny to watch ourselves and our families gradually turning into our parents and siblings. It is certainly a remedy for that condition captured in another Yiddish word: Chutzpah .
March 30, 2024
A darkly humorous and harrowing parable all at once. It's the story of sad sack writer, Lowell Lake and his unnamed wife in search of their American Dream circa late 1960s, early 1970s- set in Ft. Greene/Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
Lowell is from California and has moved to New York with dreams of becoming a writer. Writer's block creeps in, “He wanted all the voices to stop. He felt as though his head and body were being packed with warm, wet cotton, a handful at a time, and words came to him dully, like blows he had ceased to feel” (Davis 72).
To make ends meet, transitions to becoming a technical writer and finally, discovers the Collingwood home, a sprawling and dilapidated house that he purchases with his life savings and is determined to renovate.
To the dismay of his family, the house is located in the Ft. Greene/Clinton Hill neighborhood where it is a heavily black neighborhood. White fragility ensues, and Lowell is left to his devices, slowly his mental state disintegrating to the point when a trespasser arrives on the scene, murder is on his mind, "the place no longer meant anything: there were no dreams or excitements left in it, yet he was going on...God knew where his steps would lead him, probably nowhere in particular" (Davis 213).
I read this because the foreword was written by Jonathan Lethem, one of my favorite writers. He shares that he personally knew Mr. Davis because he was friendly with his son. Plus being one of the big Brooklyn writers of American literature today, it's only fitting that Lethem would pay tribute to a family friend whose story would influence the great Brooklyn novels he'd later write, and he does mention, "A Meaningful Life" gave way to influencing the way the immortal "The Fortress of Solitude" would be shaped.
As someone who has passed these neighborhoods in my own day to day life, I have been hyper aware of the displacement and gentrification Brooklyn's experienced in my years of living in the Northeast.
Lowell's one of the early gentrifiers- what he does foreshadows the 30 years of which Brooklyn would transform from an urban setting to a much more commercialized, white space in which much of the grit, artistic charm, and diversity of the borough would find itself in a predicament that would become fraught with tension regarding class and race.
Lowell is from California and has moved to New York with dreams of becoming a writer. Writer's block creeps in, “He wanted all the voices to stop. He felt as though his head and body were being packed with warm, wet cotton, a handful at a time, and words came to him dully, like blows he had ceased to feel” (Davis 72).
To make ends meet, transitions to becoming a technical writer and finally, discovers the Collingwood home, a sprawling and dilapidated house that he purchases with his life savings and is determined to renovate.
To the dismay of his family, the house is located in the Ft. Greene/Clinton Hill neighborhood where it is a heavily black neighborhood. White fragility ensues, and Lowell is left to his devices, slowly his mental state disintegrating to the point when a trespasser arrives on the scene, murder is on his mind, "the place no longer meant anything: there were no dreams or excitements left in it, yet he was going on...God knew where his steps would lead him, probably nowhere in particular" (Davis 213).
I read this because the foreword was written by Jonathan Lethem, one of my favorite writers. He shares that he personally knew Mr. Davis because he was friendly with his son. Plus being one of the big Brooklyn writers of American literature today, it's only fitting that Lethem would pay tribute to a family friend whose story would influence the great Brooklyn novels he'd later write, and he does mention, "A Meaningful Life" gave way to influencing the way the immortal "The Fortress of Solitude" would be shaped.
As someone who has passed these neighborhoods in my own day to day life, I have been hyper aware of the displacement and gentrification Brooklyn's experienced in my years of living in the Northeast.
Lowell's one of the early gentrifiers- what he does foreshadows the 30 years of which Brooklyn would transform from an urban setting to a much more commercialized, white space in which much of the grit, artistic charm, and diversity of the borough would find itself in a predicament that would become fraught with tension regarding class and race.
November 29, 2019
If you are prone to suddenly looking around your life and yelling, "My God, what am I doing here?" you may be as intrigued by this book as I was.
A Meaningful Life is a good bad dream with a really dismal ending. In Lowell Lake, author L. J. Davis has created the quintessential nebbish protagonist. Lowell Lake is a person who seems to have dropped into life in a human body with no idea what to do with it or how to navigate the terrain.
The reading experience is equally hilarious and horrible, and ultimately depressing. Lowell's work and marriage are hilarious, and his decision to buy and gentrify a slumlord's rooming house in 1960s Brooklyn, removing the present tenants—"the Negroes"—was horrifying and finally stultifying. Reading this section was like enduring a low-grade electrical shock. Davis's genius is that he managed to write a white nebbish's perceptions of stereotypical black people without stereotyping anybody. And therefore he pokes at the systemic racism that is the norm for white people in our society. And it is uncomfortable—uncomfortable for this white person to have it exposed and be forced to acknowledge that it is there, despite all my desire that it not be.
Lowell is a WASP from Boise, Idaho, who marries a "nice Jewish girl" from Flatbush, Brooklyn, so there is similar poking about anti-Semitic attitudes. But since I am a member of the Semite tribe, I did not experience any poking. I just laughed. (I'd wondered how black readers would relate to the gentrification content, and my hope is that they would nod and find it as funny as I did the anti-Semitic material.)
I loved reading about my hometown, New York City, in the 1960s. This is a quintessential New York book, a writer's book, and a book for anyone who can laugh at being poked and exposed. But its hopeless ending felt heavy and tired.
A note about typos:
There are a lot of them in the Kindle edition--straight typos as well as formatting glitches where sentences are interrupted by paragraph breaks. This doesn't get in the way of reading comprehension, but it is annoying.
A Meaningful Life is a good bad dream with a really dismal ending. In Lowell Lake, author L. J. Davis has created the quintessential nebbish protagonist. Lowell Lake is a person who seems to have dropped into life in a human body with no idea what to do with it or how to navigate the terrain.
The reading experience is equally hilarious and horrible, and ultimately depressing. Lowell's work and marriage are hilarious, and his decision to buy and gentrify a slumlord's rooming house in 1960s Brooklyn, removing the present tenants—"the Negroes"—was horrifying and finally stultifying. Reading this section was like enduring a low-grade electrical shock. Davis's genius is that he managed to write a white nebbish's perceptions of stereotypical black people without stereotyping anybody. And therefore he pokes at the systemic racism that is the norm for white people in our society. And it is uncomfortable—uncomfortable for this white person to have it exposed and be forced to acknowledge that it is there, despite all my desire that it not be.
Lowell is a WASP from Boise, Idaho, who marries a "nice Jewish girl" from Flatbush, Brooklyn, so there is similar poking about anti-Semitic attitudes. But since I am a member of the Semite tribe, I did not experience any poking. I just laughed. (I'd wondered how black readers would relate to the gentrification content, and my hope is that they would nod and find it as funny as I did the anti-Semitic material.)
I loved reading about my hometown, New York City, in the 1960s. This is a quintessential New York book, a writer's book, and a book for anyone who can laugh at being poked and exposed. But its hopeless ending felt heavy and tired.
A note about typos:
There are a lot of them in the Kindle edition--straight typos as well as formatting glitches where sentences are interrupted by paragraph breaks. This doesn't get in the way of reading comprehension, but it is annoying.
March 23, 2025
Having read Diary of a Rapist a few weeks previously and now this I have to question whether any man in the 1970’s actually like his wife? Clearly men of the 70’s were having issues. The protagonist here Lowell Lake is not dissimilar to Connell’s Summerfield, albeit he is more successful in his career.
While at college he meets the woman who will become his wife more as a result of drift than intent. A man with no sense of direction he ends up giving up a scholarship and life of academia at Berkley to present himself as strong and decisive to his wife who harried him into it. He ends up in New York in an undemanding, unfulfilling job that is sufficiently well-paid to keep him permanently drunk so he does not need to examine the dissatisfaction he feels with his existence. His only social interaction is with his in-laws, a couple so bland that a decade into his marriage he still does not know the first name of the mother.
Like Summerfield Lowell has a brooding sense that he is not living up to his expectations as a man. He does not do manual labour, he does not produce anything. At one point he laments that he has no clue how to fix a leaky faucet. So on another whim he buys a huge house in Brooklyn. Once the home of a wealthy family what he is now buying is a multi-occupancy run down squat where nothing works and residents shit on the floor. His wife, just as she was about the move to New York, is anti his idea and when he also tries to concede that it was a bad idea she again harries him and he feels he must save face and buys it. His plan is to restore it to its former glory, uncover the marble fireplaces hidden under layers of paint that sort of thing and to do so he must evict the tenants and find the neighbours distasteful in the way that gentrification demands.
His hopes of proving himself a doer, a producer a creator never reach fruition. He can destroy – rip up floors, break up furniture, throw out a tenant’s possessions but he realises that he cannot make, cannot do and so needs a local resident handyman/builder to do it. This realisation exacerbates his drinking and culminates in destruction he could never have foreseen.
Anyone wanting an uplifting tale of a man finding his meaning or a man who develops a hitherto hidden humanity had better look to something written by a millennial who envisions the world as the utopia they hope it will become rather than a man who could see society as it really was and where it was headed 50 years earlier
While at college he meets the woman who will become his wife more as a result of drift than intent. A man with no sense of direction he ends up giving up a scholarship and life of academia at Berkley to present himself as strong and decisive to his wife who harried him into it. He ends up in New York in an undemanding, unfulfilling job that is sufficiently well-paid to keep him permanently drunk so he does not need to examine the dissatisfaction he feels with his existence. His only social interaction is with his in-laws, a couple so bland that a decade into his marriage he still does not know the first name of the mother.
Like Summerfield Lowell has a brooding sense that he is not living up to his expectations as a man. He does not do manual labour, he does not produce anything. At one point he laments that he has no clue how to fix a leaky faucet. So on another whim he buys a huge house in Brooklyn. Once the home of a wealthy family what he is now buying is a multi-occupancy run down squat where nothing works and residents shit on the floor. His wife, just as she was about the move to New York, is anti his idea and when he also tries to concede that it was a bad idea she again harries him and he feels he must save face and buys it. His plan is to restore it to its former glory, uncover the marble fireplaces hidden under layers of paint that sort of thing and to do so he must evict the tenants and find the neighbours distasteful in the way that gentrification demands.
His hopes of proving himself a doer, a producer a creator never reach fruition. He can destroy – rip up floors, break up furniture, throw out a tenant’s possessions but he realises that he cannot make, cannot do and so needs a local resident handyman/builder to do it. This realisation exacerbates his drinking and culminates in destruction he could never have foreseen.
Anyone wanting an uplifting tale of a man finding his meaning or a man who develops a hitherto hidden humanity had better look to something written by a millennial who envisions the world as the utopia they hope it will become rather than a man who could see society as it really was and where it was headed 50 years earlier
February 17, 2014
'What is the meaning of crime?
Is it criminals robbin' innocent mothafuckers every time?
Little shorties take walks to the schoolyard
Tryin' to solve the puzzles to why is life so hard
Then as soon as they reach the playground POW
Shots ring off and now one of 'em lay down
It's so hard to escape the gunfire
I wish I could rule it out like a umpire
But it's an everlasting game and it never cease to exist, only the players change.'
All I can say about this book is that it's dangerous. It hit me like a bottle to the face. I'm not sure exactly what those words from the Genius have to do with it, but I'm pretty sure it's something.
Is it criminals robbin' innocent mothafuckers every time?
Little shorties take walks to the schoolyard
Tryin' to solve the puzzles to why is life so hard
Then as soon as they reach the playground POW
Shots ring off and now one of 'em lay down
It's so hard to escape the gunfire
I wish I could rule it out like a umpire
But it's an everlasting game and it never cease to exist, only the players change.'
All I can say about this book is that it's dangerous. It hit me like a bottle to the face. I'm not sure exactly what those words from the Genius have to do with it, but I'm pretty sure it's something.
August 26, 2016
Like Jonathan Lethem in his introduction to this 1971 novel I was impressed by the great writing but made uncomfortable by how "un-PC" it was. This is a New York of another time, of course, and gentrification is a major theme of the novel. Davis's protagonist Lowell Lake says of the neighborhood where he chooses to buy a 22-room mansion in disrepair that:
There are aspects of this novel I actually loved: the wife - she is a sort of straight man to Lowell:
But the second half of the novel was harder to read. Protagonist Lowell decides to make his life more meaningful with a new project - buying and renovating a dilapidated 22-room mansion in the Brooklyn ghetto that is full of poor people. His first tour of this house was like a Dantean descent to the underworld - the lives of the squatters in this house were mostly appalling and bizarre and so NOT funny to this reader. For a comic novel it was hard to take.
I see that other writers also express both praise and bewilderment at the weirdness of this novel. (It's one of the NYRB rediscovered contemporary classics): a "phantasmagoria of urban decay and heightened obsession" (Katherine Powers) and "pure chaos" (O Magazine) and "one of the strangest novels I have ever read" (Geoff Dyer). But this is satire, of course, and I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of contemporary African American satirists like Paul Beatty or T. Geronimo Johnson on this work.
The scene was so hyperbolically poverty-stricken that it didn't look real; it looked contrived, like a set for some kind of incredible squalid version of Porgy and Bess.
There are aspects of this novel I actually loved: the wife - she is a sort of straight man to Lowell:
I don't understand what you're talking about," she said. "You're not being very clear. Maybe you can explain it better." For a computer expert, she did not grasp concepts easily, if at all, but she was tenacious and seldom gave up. Her mind was capable of worrying an unclear concept for hours on end, shaking it like a rag doll until she'd found out whether it was good for her, bad for her, significant in any way, or utterly meaningless.And the first third of the book is really funny - think the deadpan early scenes of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. Lowell's hostile mother-in-law and craven father-in-law are marvelous characters, and the scene in which adult Lowell takes off in his car for Reno to avoid his commitments and finds his parents chasing him down - this was great.
But the second half of the novel was harder to read. Protagonist Lowell decides to make his life more meaningful with a new project - buying and renovating a dilapidated 22-room mansion in the Brooklyn ghetto that is full of poor people. His first tour of this house was like a Dantean descent to the underworld - the lives of the squatters in this house were mostly appalling and bizarre and so NOT funny to this reader. For a comic novel it was hard to take.
I see that other writers also express both praise and bewilderment at the weirdness of this novel. (It's one of the NYRB rediscovered contemporary classics): a "phantasmagoria of urban decay and heightened obsession" (Katherine Powers) and "pure chaos" (O Magazine) and "one of the strangest novels I have ever read" (Geoff Dyer). But this is satire, of course, and I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of contemporary African American satirists like Paul Beatty or T. Geronimo Johnson on this work.
September 1, 2014
This book's reviews don't do it justice: it is a taut, brilliant, hands-down modern classic. It plays out against a background of gentrification in Brooklyn in the early 1970s, but more importantly, it's an existential yell, a pitch-perfect rendition of a young married professional for whom everything has come easily, whose life feels eerily empty.
Lowell Lake comes up from a small town in Idaho to study at Stanford, marry his college sweetheart and, reluctantly, move to New York and take a job at a plumbers' weekly. The stultifying nature of his job and marriage, coupled with his retiring personality, lead him to the brink of madness. Lacking any challenge or interest, he decides to buy an apartment in Brooklyn, the sleaziest, most terrifying area he has ever been to. In the process of buying and attempting to refurbish an old mansion, he undergoes something like a process of renewal - though L.J. Davis is in no mood to teach lessons, and lets his protagonist's growth take second billing beneath the comic moments.
Davis's dry prose is laugh-out-loud funny and his plotting is terrific. This book was pure pleasure to read. It is something like a comic adaptation of Crime and Punishment made by the Coen brothers, set in winter in 1970s New York. Recommended to people who like film noir (or Todd Solondz movies) for the jokes.
Lowell Lake comes up from a small town in Idaho to study at Stanford, marry his college sweetheart and, reluctantly, move to New York and take a job at a plumbers' weekly. The stultifying nature of his job and marriage, coupled with his retiring personality, lead him to the brink of madness. Lacking any challenge or interest, he decides to buy an apartment in Brooklyn, the sleaziest, most terrifying area he has ever been to. In the process of buying and attempting to refurbish an old mansion, he undergoes something like a process of renewal - though L.J. Davis is in no mood to teach lessons, and lets his protagonist's growth take second billing beneath the comic moments.
Davis's dry prose is laugh-out-loud funny and his plotting is terrific. This book was pure pleasure to read. It is something like a comic adaptation of Crime and Punishment made by the Coen brothers, set in winter in 1970s New York. Recommended to people who like film noir (or Todd Solondz movies) for the jokes.
June 11, 2023
A satire first published 1971 , about a fustrated novelist who tries to redeem his banal existence through the renovation of an old Brooklyn mansion.
Like almost all readers I read the edition from 2009. Its late success 40 years after the first publication is based on its interesting view on the early days of gentrification of Brooklyn, which was at the time the story is set one of the most dangerous and poorest neighborhoods in New York. Today the big old mansion that the protagonist buys for some thousands of dollars would be worth millions.
But beware, this is not a guide for future home renovators. It is a satire - the protagonist is a complete spineless loser. He drinks to much and he makes one bad decision after the other. Also, only recomended if you do not have problems with unPC language.
Like almost all readers I read the edition from 2009. Its late success 40 years after the first publication is based on its interesting view on the early days of gentrification of Brooklyn, which was at the time the story is set one of the most dangerous and poorest neighborhoods in New York. Today the big old mansion that the protagonist buys for some thousands of dollars would be worth millions.
But beware, this is not a guide for future home renovators. It is a satire - the protagonist is a complete spineless loser. He drinks to much and he makes one bad decision after the other. Also, only recomended if you do not have problems with unPC language.
December 31, 2016
I reread this book on a city break to NYC specifically because I was staying in a still gentrifying area of Brooklyn, and having remembered appreciating it the first time I read it a number of years ago. To be honest, I'd forgotten the blackly comedic aspect of the book - the narrative reminded me a lot of JG Farrell in 'Troubles' or 'Siege of Krishnapur', in the way that it was hard hitting at the same time as raising a chuckle at the antics of the protagonists.
A biting satire on the eventual gentrification of much of the city in the 1970s / 80s / 90s, and one that's well worth the read.
A biting satire on the eventual gentrification of much of the city in the 1970s / 80s / 90s, and one that's well worth the read.
August 25, 2021
I'm compelled by my inner conscience to write this review even though I am confident not more than a dozen people will ever read it.
So let's begin, what is the book about? Without spoiling anything, it is the story of a stoic who finally decides to take action. At 30, Lowell Lake has an epiphany that his life has so far been ordinary, mediocre and to him, meaningless. And so he starts acting like a, quite justifiably, dissatisfied middle aged man. I was with him till this. At this point he utters a line that though quite normal in context resonated with me. He says, "my problem? My problem is that I'm not having a meaningful life". This is all within the first 15 pages of the novel. After this, things just sort of happen and descend into absolute nihilism by the end.
The writing is terrific and yet, so dull and boring. Maybe it'll be different for others but for me, I finished two novels and a dozen short stories before finally deciding I am going to finish this. I started at page 117 and read it all the way to the end without stopping once because I just wanted to get this out of the way.
The descriptions are bland, it's like reading lists of things that are there. Occasionally, there's a funny metaphor or simlie. Really, this book is funny, it's hilarious. The humor comes from the absurdity of everything, even the main character is a total fuckwit. Perhaps that's the whole point, that at least you're not like Lowell Lake. However, I don't see how that excuses 200 pages of just stuff happening, with no structure and only a few occasional laughs to carry it along.
The main character is despicable. I have read many novels where the protagonist is a complete loser but I have never, ever hated one as much as Lowell Lake and I think, L.J. Davis. I absolutely do not agree with what seems to be the gist of the novel, that sometimes it's too late to be happy and that financial success and following trends doesn't actually lead to any sustainable happiness. I guess the last part is okay but I don't think 30 is too old. I'm 21 and I'll be 30 soon.
So let's begin, what is the book about? Without spoiling anything, it is the story of a stoic who finally decides to take action. At 30, Lowell Lake has an epiphany that his life has so far been ordinary, mediocre and to him, meaningless. And so he starts acting like a, quite justifiably, dissatisfied middle aged man. I was with him till this. At this point he utters a line that though quite normal in context resonated with me. He says, "my problem? My problem is that I'm not having a meaningful life". This is all within the first 15 pages of the novel. After this, things just sort of happen and descend into absolute nihilism by the end.
The writing is terrific and yet, so dull and boring. Maybe it'll be different for others but for me, I finished two novels and a dozen short stories before finally deciding I am going to finish this. I started at page 117 and read it all the way to the end without stopping once because I just wanted to get this out of the way.
The descriptions are bland, it's like reading lists of things that are there. Occasionally, there's a funny metaphor or simlie. Really, this book is funny, it's hilarious. The humor comes from the absurdity of everything, even the main character is a total fuckwit. Perhaps that's the whole point, that at least you're not like Lowell Lake. However, I don't see how that excuses 200 pages of just stuff happening, with no structure and only a few occasional laughs to carry it along.
The main character is despicable. I have read many novels where the protagonist is a complete loser but I have never, ever hated one as much as Lowell Lake and I think, L.J. Davis. I absolutely do not agree with what seems to be the gist of the novel, that sometimes it's too late to be happy and that financial success and following trends doesn't actually lead to any sustainable happiness. I guess the last part is okay but I don't think 30 is too old. I'm 21 and I'll be 30 soon.
August 9, 2009
I always read the best books in the strangest of ways. I put this book on my request list at the library and it finally came in for me a few weeks back. I piddled around and didn’t get to it and when I tried to renew it, I saw that I couldn’t as it was on hold for someone else. All this for a library book that looked so new the spine wasn’t yet bent, but with a copyright date of 1971.
How could I resist trying to read it before I had to return it?
This book has my book friend KK’s name all over it and there is just one good word to describe it: snarky. Lowell Lake goes to college, gets married, and moves to Brooklyn, all rather haphazardly, but it takes turning thirty to set him off on a quest for a meaningful life.
It’s laugh-out-loud funny, but in a horribly mean sort of way. No cute puppies in this story. But it reads honest and true as well as funny which moves it way up there on my list of Books I Recommend.
Side note: It has been almost forty years, so I had to see what Mr. L.J. Davis was up to these days. Still alive, but not writing fiction, apparently. Did Davis ever find a meaningful life? How much of the book was autobiographical? And why no more fiction?
How could I resist trying to read it before I had to return it?
This book has my book friend KK’s name all over it and there is just one good word to describe it: snarky. Lowell Lake goes to college, gets married, and moves to Brooklyn, all rather haphazardly, but it takes turning thirty to set him off on a quest for a meaningful life.
It’s laugh-out-loud funny, but in a horribly mean sort of way. No cute puppies in this story. But it reads honest and true as well as funny which moves it way up there on my list of Books I Recommend.
Side note: It has been almost forty years, so I had to see what Mr. L.J. Davis was up to these days. Still alive, but not writing fiction, apparently. Did Davis ever find a meaningful life? How much of the book was autobiographical? And why no more fiction?
March 21, 2016
'A Meaningful Life' is a seething assault on what it means to live in New York City, how a life of little substance gets absorbed into the great melting-pot mass and slowly loses its shape, its purpose, its meaning. This is urban existentialism and dread narrated with acidic reflection, brimming with metaphors that are ugly, mean-spirited, but downright hilarious in how they skewer the ruined psyche of the main character, Lowell Lake. How Davis manages to be so bleak and so damn funny at the same time is truly a marvel. He peoples his world with characters who are all unlikable. They come in and out of the narrative like demented caricatures, indifferent losers, miserable blowhards. Nobody likes living in the city yet nobody can escape.
Read this as a parody lined with razor wire, a biting commentary on gentrification, or a scalding critique of the WASP mindset, but also read it for the playful cruelty that Davis indulges his descriptions with. On every page, he’s like a cat playing with a crippled mouse. There is so much to love about this grotesque little book. Parts Bruno Schulz and Hubert Selby, Joseph Heller and Gilbert Sorrentino, this book will change the way you look at real estate and home renovation, as well as marriage and family. A major book about a minor apocalypse, this one goes to my top shelf.
Excerpts:
‘Not even the spectacle of his wife coming in the door at her usual time could rouse him from his torpor; his psyche was in limp tatters, like an old kleenex dredged up from the bottom of a purse.’
‘The little girl and an even smaller boy were seated rigidly side by side on an enormous, spavined, yellowish sofa that was much and questionably stained and which stank to high heaven with an odor that resembled a superhumanly protracted fart.’
‘He regarded the bag of shit that was about to fall on him with a kind of fatalism. He’d always know this was going to happen.’
‘The drunks next door never said a thing. Lowell had a bad moment the first time he had to pass them, but they just sat there and looked at him with a very total kind of indifference as if he were a traffic accident or a fly.’
Read this as a parody lined with razor wire, a biting commentary on gentrification, or a scalding critique of the WASP mindset, but also read it for the playful cruelty that Davis indulges his descriptions with. On every page, he’s like a cat playing with a crippled mouse. There is so much to love about this grotesque little book. Parts Bruno Schulz and Hubert Selby, Joseph Heller and Gilbert Sorrentino, this book will change the way you look at real estate and home renovation, as well as marriage and family. A major book about a minor apocalypse, this one goes to my top shelf.
Excerpts:
‘Not even the spectacle of his wife coming in the door at her usual time could rouse him from his torpor; his psyche was in limp tatters, like an old kleenex dredged up from the bottom of a purse.’
‘The little girl and an even smaller boy were seated rigidly side by side on an enormous, spavined, yellowish sofa that was much and questionably stained and which stank to high heaven with an odor that resembled a superhumanly protracted fart.’
‘He regarded the bag of shit that was about to fall on him with a kind of fatalism. He’d always know this was going to happen.’
‘The drunks next door never said a thing. Lowell had a bad moment the first time he had to pass them, but they just sat there and looked at him with a very total kind of indifference as if he were a traffic accident or a fly.’
Read
April 3, 2023There's a way that the 1960s feels like it belongs to the past and the 1970s belongs to the present. That's not a clear break, as movies and novels heading even to the 1980s still feel part of the past. For example, Network feels past and so does the Lorrie Moore story "How to be the Other Woman". Movies like Patton and The Sting feel like the past, but something like Rocky or Deer Hunter feel like the present. There's also transitional books and movies like MASH or Desperate Characters or Dog Day Afternoon with a foot in each corner. Raymond Carver is in the present.
The book, from 1971, is from the present. There's a presence here that feels like we're no longer looking at how the world was and how the world will be, but squarely on knowing that we're heading a certain direction, and what do we make of it.
Lowell is a west coaster who has moved to New York, and finds out nine years too late that his temporary job as a technical writer has become permanent. And his marriage to his college sweetheart is also permanent, and it's not even that he really wants out, but that she might hate him and he's not sure what to do with that. Feeling some kind of way about this life, they move to Brooklyn, encroaching upon the primarily Black residents there and don't seem to learn a lot of life lessons. I find this novel rich and richly written. It's not whiny and it's not transcendent, but it captures something.
The book, from 1971, is from the present. There's a presence here that feels like we're no longer looking at how the world was and how the world will be, but squarely on knowing that we're heading a certain direction, and what do we make of it.
Lowell is a west coaster who has moved to New York, and finds out nine years too late that his temporary job as a technical writer has become permanent. And his marriage to his college sweetheart is also permanent, and it's not even that he really wants out, but that she might hate him and he's not sure what to do with that. Feeling some kind of way about this life, they move to Brooklyn, encroaching upon the primarily Black residents there and don't seem to learn a lot of life lessons. I find this novel rich and richly written. It's not whiny and it's not transcendent, but it captures something.
March 5, 2010
You should definitely read this book, if only for the sole purpose of reassuring yourself that your life is definitely, enormously, ridiculously better than Lowell Lake's, whose charmed, though boring, youth (he unwittingly blackmails a local politician into paying for his Stanford education--he (the politician) thinks that Lowell knows about his secret gay dalliances at his (Lowell's) parents' motel, about which Lowell, of course, knows nothing) takes a decided turn when he marries the wrong girl and ends up moving to New York instead of Berkeley.
Since I've recently moved to New York, I had a hard time not convulsing with sad laughter at the ridiculous state of Lowell's adult life. He attempts to take control of his life and marriage by buying (and renovating) a rotting monstrosity of a house in the not-yet-gentrified, still pretty friggin' frightening Brooklyn of the 1960s.
Here's Lowell at the altar, realizing he's just about to make a huge mistake:
"He was in the hopper of a great machine and he could no more get them to turn it off than a confessed and proven murderer could change his mind about his trial. It was the Donner Pass all over again, only permanent."
Since I've recently moved to New York, I had a hard time not convulsing with sad laughter at the ridiculous state of Lowell's adult life. He attempts to take control of his life and marriage by buying (and renovating) a rotting monstrosity of a house in the not-yet-gentrified, still pretty friggin' frightening Brooklyn of the 1960s.
Here's Lowell at the altar, realizing he's just about to make a huge mistake:
"He was in the hopper of a great machine and he could no more get them to turn it off than a confessed and proven murderer could change his mind about his trial. It was the Donner Pass all over again, only permanent."
April 4, 2014
A novel about a failed writer who wakes up one day and realizes his life has no meaning, so he goes in search of some. 1971.
Full review (and other recommendations!) at Another look book
Not the kind of book I usually read, but I enjoyed this one a lot. It reminded me in many ways of Wish Her Safe at Home, in that it takes a nice but sort of crazy/pitiful character and puts them in an old house, which then takes over their life. It's like a modernist approach to all those D.E. Stevenson-type books about people falling in love with houses. And as a person who loves houses, especially old houses, I have to say I get it! A great read if you're in the mood for something funny and a bit dark.
Full review (and other recommendations!) at Another look book
Not the kind of book I usually read, but I enjoyed this one a lot. It reminded me in many ways of Wish Her Safe at Home, in that it takes a nice but sort of crazy/pitiful character and puts them in an old house, which then takes over their life. It's like a modernist approach to all those D.E. Stevenson-type books about people falling in love with houses. And as a person who loves houses, especially old houses, I have to say I get it! A great read if you're in the mood for something funny and a bit dark.
July 20, 2014
Very bleak, but so funny. Hard to believe it was written nearly 40 years ago. Lowell's inner dialogue is probably the most accurately neurotic one I've read. "Soul food?" and his subsequent self-scolding made me laugh so hard.
I realized about 20 pages in that it was probably going to end with him killing someone, and I was OK with that. Someone so neurotic with so much despair is going to plateau in some way. I understood Lowell perhaps more than I should.
I realized about 20 pages in that it was probably going to end with him killing someone, and I was OK with that. Someone so neurotic with so much despair is going to plateau in some way. I understood Lowell perhaps more than I should.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 12, 2025
Just unbearably bleak, undeniably comic for a beat until it’s really not so funny anymore. The racial crassness is certainly startling at first until you realize that for all the offhanded comments about Black and Puerto Rican ‘bums’ there is still not a single figure the author has more unmitigated contempt for than Lowell Lake, his white male protagonist. As the novel unfolds, any disparate chance that the reader might find some smidgeon of sympathy within themselves for Lake grows more and more distant until it’s all but vanished. Lake is completely pathetic, a nobody to top all nobodies. Probably the most damning piece of literary evidence I’ve yet found for American whiteness as causal to the destruction of self. Better yet, Lake has no pretensions of superiority, he’s not even a white supremacist by any conceivable measure; he’s really just a rat in a little urban maze constructed so that a cheesy scent is dispensed by machinery to conceal the absence of cheese itself. Not a fully masted critique of integration nor even of early gentrification, rather it calls back to flaws in an American Premise nearly 500 years old. Perhaps, some ghostly voice implies from a distant horizon, we were never meant to live like this, not here. Unfortunately for Lake and his entire class of crazed, solipsistic, confused white men, the message arrives far too late.
November 17, 2023
In a long line of extremely dark, anti-life-affirming books that still make me laugh. Thought about Gwendolyn Riley books while reading this one; also, strangely, John Barth. Maybe even a little John Williams, frankly.
How about I stop spouting off names of authors and just say that this is a funny, depressing, slim, and compulsively readable novel about gentrification in Brooklyn, but written in 1971. I don't know if I've read a book with a protagonist the author despises more than this one, and I'm pretty sure the protagonist is a stand-in for the author. Weird stuff!
How about I stop spouting off names of authors and just say that this is a funny, depressing, slim, and compulsively readable novel about gentrification in Brooklyn, but written in 1971. I don't know if I've read a book with a protagonist the author despises more than this one, and I'm pretty sure the protagonist is a stand-in for the author. Weird stuff!
December 16, 2022
Lowell Lake is an unhappy man. He works at a plumbing magazine (this is set in the 1970s, when I suppose things such as plumbing magazines existed) and is married to his college sweetheart, but one day he wakes up and tells his wife that he wants to live a 'meaningful life'. He wants to break free of the monotony of his city life and actually do something with his time. This results in Lowell buying a crumbling mansion in the heart of Brooklyn, a Brooklyn that is still viewed as 'dangerous' by white Manhattanites and is full of immigrant and working class families, before the deluge of gentrification that would come later in the century.
Lowell slowly loses his sense of reality, by putting everything into the restoration of this giant home. His marriage suffers, he mental health suffers, but it's fine with him since he's working towards this ephemeral 'meaningful life'. There is a sense of dread as you reach the end, as you realize that this can only end badly, and there is a scene of violence that jolts Lowell out of his stupor, arguably. (It's hard to know exactly, as the book ends rather abruptly, but I appreciate the choice by L.J. Davis to leave the reader to their own conclusion).
I forgot where I first heard of this book. I have a soft spot for NYRB Classics and this cover/title/jacket copy was enough to convince me to try it out. I'm really glad to have read this book, as it is a snapshot of a particular historical moment of New York City history--the shaping of modern day Brooklyn by rich, white proprietors. Davis is a skilled writer, and uses humor with a masterful touch, which kept me hooked from the beginning (the opening chapter is something straight out of a Coen Brothers comedy) and the chapter detailing the condition of the brownstone is harrowing and could be pulled from a horror movie. I suspect some readers today will be put off by the very non-politically correct nature of the description of many characters, but it feels dumb to be put off by that since this was published in 1971. A Meaningful Life is rich with themes for contemporary readers to chew on and contemplate. Definitely recommended--this book deserves a larger readership! 4.5/5
Lowell slowly loses his sense of reality, by putting everything into the restoration of this giant home. His marriage suffers, he mental health suffers, but it's fine with him since he's working towards this ephemeral 'meaningful life'. There is a sense of dread as you reach the end, as you realize that this can only end badly, and there is a scene of violence that jolts Lowell out of his stupor, arguably. (It's hard to know exactly, as the book ends rather abruptly, but I appreciate the choice by L.J. Davis to leave the reader to their own conclusion).
I forgot where I first heard of this book. I have a soft spot for NYRB Classics and this cover/title/jacket copy was enough to convince me to try it out. I'm really glad to have read this book, as it is a snapshot of a particular historical moment of New York City history--the shaping of modern day Brooklyn by rich, white proprietors. Davis is a skilled writer, and uses humor with a masterful touch, which kept me hooked from the beginning (the opening chapter is something straight out of a Coen Brothers comedy) and the chapter detailing the condition of the brownstone is harrowing and could be pulled from a horror movie. I suspect some readers today will be put off by the very non-politically correct nature of the description of many characters, but it feels dumb to be put off by that since this was published in 1971. A Meaningful Life is rich with themes for contemporary readers to chew on and contemplate. Definitely recommended--this book deserves a larger readership! 4.5/5
August 3, 2013
A short novel that feels endless at times, a what-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong tale, the story of an epic fail, in the trenches of urban gentrification and renovation.
Author Davis seems to have a short-story that is perfect for a New Yorker humor column, maybe, that he has extrapolated into a full novel in length. At times it's a charmingly exasperating kind of strategy, able to include all kinds of asides and sidebars that stray from the action but enhance the story and characters. At other times, the reader is stuck in the circles of hell with the protagonist, wishing only for a quick end to it all.
Overall, I think he has a novella here, one that needs an understandingly sympathetic editorial hand; the relentless 'and-then-it-gets-worse' storyline needs paring down-- integration, rather than chopping out. The wandering perspective and detached introspection are also well worth keeping, but maybe restraining a little too.
At best A Meaningful Life feels like those hapless characters in some Fitzgerald and most Nathaniel West creations, striving, generally-competent Everymen, who get caught in a stupefying chaos that reflects the world we've inherited.
At worst, we have something like Confederacy Of Dunces or Portnoy, whose self-loathing and flailing self-regard end up making the reader wish he were anywhere else, and in story terms tend to advance the plot to exactly nowhere.
For this reader, the latter effect weighs down the forward action of the novel to a fatally flawed crawl, and the murder that happens toward the very end of the story is positioned poorly to put the whole thing back on the tracks. If Macbeth has a perfectly-timed murder, this has the opposite. It would have added pace and adrenaline if it had occurred in the middle going, but as it is, the jolt somehow isn't enough, and it is too late for any revived interest.
Author Davis seems to have a short-story that is perfect for a New Yorker humor column, maybe, that he has extrapolated into a full novel in length. At times it's a charmingly exasperating kind of strategy, able to include all kinds of asides and sidebars that stray from the action but enhance the story and characters. At other times, the reader is stuck in the circles of hell with the protagonist, wishing only for a quick end to it all.
Overall, I think he has a novella here, one that needs an understandingly sympathetic editorial hand; the relentless 'and-then-it-gets-worse' storyline needs paring down-- integration, rather than chopping out. The wandering perspective and detached introspection are also well worth keeping, but maybe restraining a little too.
At best A Meaningful Life feels like those hapless characters in some Fitzgerald and most Nathaniel West creations, striving, generally-competent Everymen, who get caught in a stupefying chaos that reflects the world we've inherited.
At worst, we have something like Confederacy Of Dunces or Portnoy, whose self-loathing and flailing self-regard end up making the reader wish he were anywhere else, and in story terms tend to advance the plot to exactly nowhere.
For this reader, the latter effect weighs down the forward action of the novel to a fatally flawed crawl, and the murder that happens toward the very end of the story is positioned poorly to put the whole thing back on the tracks. If Macbeth has a perfectly-timed murder, this has the opposite. It would have added pace and adrenaline if it had occurred in the middle going, but as it is, the jolt somehow isn't enough, and it is too late for any revived interest.
November 25, 2010
This book just randomly jumped out at me when I was hustling through the shelves at the library. For some reason I stopped and pulled it out, and noticed there is an intro by Jonathon Lethem, one of whom's books I weirdly happened to be holding in my hands and was about to check out. It was synchronistic so I grabbed this book too.
What a great book! I am almost done and loving it. The main character is so passive, it is so annoying and frustrating to me, I want to jump into the pages and shake him really hard. I think he may be like a certain aspect of myself blown to an extreme. His wife is awful, her family is awful, in fact everyone in general seems to be so awful, but the writing is so funny and clever, you just keep reading. You wonder if everyone seeming awful is just a reflection of the main character, or a statement on New York in the late 60's or just people in general. Maybe a lot of people and life are just awful! ha ha!
And this isn't one of those, "this guy had a meaningless life, then bought this house against all odds, and finally found passion and his life changed and he finally found the meaning of life" things, thank god! I am near the end and it seems like he is just heading into a miserable weird drunk old guy in New York future, which I think is way better way for the book to go. But we'll see....
...just finished...The ending was perfect, totally bleak. Loved it.
What a great book! I am almost done and loving it. The main character is so passive, it is so annoying and frustrating to me, I want to jump into the pages and shake him really hard. I think he may be like a certain aspect of myself blown to an extreme. His wife is awful, her family is awful, in fact everyone in general seems to be so awful, but the writing is so funny and clever, you just keep reading. You wonder if everyone seeming awful is just a reflection of the main character, or a statement on New York in the late 60's or just people in general. Maybe a lot of people and life are just awful! ha ha!
And this isn't one of those, "this guy had a meaningless life, then bought this house against all odds, and finally found passion and his life changed and he finally found the meaning of life" things, thank god! I am near the end and it seems like he is just heading into a miserable weird drunk old guy in New York future, which I think is way better way for the book to go. But we'll see....
...just finished...The ending was perfect, totally bleak. Loved it.
October 18, 2009
A bleak satire of the search for personal fulfillment through real estate. Written in 1971, it remains strikingly topical today, awash as we are in HGTV and the myriad other home improvement products. A listless man who married poorly and woke up one day to find his artistic dreams thwarted, he attempts to reassert himself through urban pioneering, but ultimately finds himself overcome by events beyond his control.
I can only give this book three stars because the middle of the book drags down with the subplot of his exceedingly annoying and overbearing wife, who he never should have married in the first place and who engineers his ennui. The ending of the book, howver, is a tour de force of nihilism and despair, evoking a bleak disintegration of identity that can only be described as impressive.
I can only give this book three stars because the middle of the book drags down with the subplot of his exceedingly annoying and overbearing wife, who he never should have married in the first place and who engineers his ennui. The ending of the book, howver, is a tour de force of nihilism and despair, evoking a bleak disintegration of identity that can only be described as impressive.
April 30, 2009
I loved this book. Its been a hundred years since I read "Catcher in the Rye" But this guy could be Holden or a relation. The book is bitter and funny.
Since I was raised in Idaho and spent 20 some years not far from Boise I totally understood the Boise references, attitude and need to depart.
I was a little disappointed by the ending but it seemed in keeping with Lowell's life.
Never heard of L.J. Davis until one morning I was reading the NY Times and an article on him and the book caught my eye. What a treasure.
Since I was raised in Idaho and spent 20 some years not far from Boise I totally understood the Boise references, attitude and need to depart.
I was a little disappointed by the ending but it seemed in keeping with Lowell's life.
Never heard of L.J. Davis until one morning I was reading the NY Times and an article on him and the book caught my eye. What a treasure.
April 15, 2009
Very clever and fun. And the renovated house is on Washington Avenue in Fort Greene, I think, which is way cool.
I love the understated humor and I could really relate to the protagonist. All of the characters seemed extremely fresh (the book was published in 1971.) The wife's dialogue was especially brilliant, as were the parents from Boise.
The end was a little odd and didn't seem entirely in keeping with the rest of the novel. I will say no more.
I love the understated humor and I could really relate to the protagonist. All of the characters seemed extremely fresh (the book was published in 1971.) The wife's dialogue was especially brilliant, as were the parents from Boise.
The end was a little odd and didn't seem entirely in keeping with the rest of the novel. I will say no more.
February 13, 2013
This is exactly what I look to NYRB Classics for: a minor gem from a writer who failed to establish himself in spite of a varied and not undistinguished output. I found myself rooting for this guy stuck in a boring job who decides to reclaim his life by renovating a mansion in a dodgy Brooklyn neighborhood (we are in the late 1960s) while sharing his wife's aggravation with him. His futile battle is heart-rending and the book has just the right amount of high comedy.
October 23, 2016
on the one hand, this was funny at times. it was also weirdly zeitgeisty for a novel written in 71.
but ... this is the story of manhattan newspaperman who wakes up one morning and decides that, even though he has a nice place and a nice wife and a nice job ... he just isn't happy.
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but ... this is the story of manhattan newspaperman who wakes up one morning and decides that, even though he has a nice place and a nice wife and a nice job ... he just isn't happy.
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September 28, 2010
One of the best Brooklyn books I've read. Best paired with Colson Whitehead's "The Colossus of New York," just so you can balance out the pessimism and the optimism.
July 22, 2016
I'll give you a hint: it's not that meaningful.
February 21, 2017
An intriguing book that verges on the fantastical about a New York from another era. It lacked a certain something to put it over the edge, but it's still worth seeking out.
December 25, 2025
It’s been a while since I read a novel about a sad white man who should treat his wife better and this is one of the best renditions. I thought it was written really smartly. Feels longer than it is but not in a bad way. Emotionally convincing and it’s not easy for a book to do that for me lately. Maybe 4.5? I got disengaged for a little bit in the second half but the end reeled me back in. But I liked it a lot… and interesting intro by Lethem
I finally found this book in Powell’s in Portland after almost exactly a year since I put it on my tbr & glad it did not disappoint
“Soon [the marriage] became bigger than both of them; it absorbed and simultaneously diminished them to the point that, finally, they lived almost exclusively on its terms, like citizens who have inadvertently voted a tyrant into office. They weren't married to each other, and it was doubtful if they ever had been, at least for long; they were married to their marriage.”
“Sometimes he had the feeling that person he knew and loved in the evenings and on weekends was nothing but a cunning impersonation, speaking in his dialect, acting out a charade of mildness and happy marriage, and that the occasionally glimpsed person with the news vendor's voice was the real one. It bothered him how easy it would be to manage it — they were together for only a few hours of their lives, not counting the times one or the other of them was asleep. Was she somebody else the rest of the time?”
“It was depressing to know everything that was going to happen to you in your life, but sometimes it could be pretty engrossing to watch an episode unfold, especially if there were unexpected variations in the script.”
“If it had been a movie, he probably would have been moved by it, but it was reality, and he was a little bewildered and kind of irritated.”
I finally found this book in Powell’s in Portland after almost exactly a year since I put it on my tbr & glad it did not disappoint
“Soon [the marriage] became bigger than both of them; it absorbed and simultaneously diminished them to the point that, finally, they lived almost exclusively on its terms, like citizens who have inadvertently voted a tyrant into office. They weren't married to each other, and it was doubtful if they ever had been, at least for long; they were married to their marriage.”
“Sometimes he had the feeling that person he knew and loved in the evenings and on weekends was nothing but a cunning impersonation, speaking in his dialect, acting out a charade of mildness and happy marriage, and that the occasionally glimpsed person with the news vendor's voice was the real one. It bothered him how easy it would be to manage it — they were together for only a few hours of their lives, not counting the times one or the other of them was asleep. Was she somebody else the rest of the time?”
“It was depressing to know everything that was going to happen to you in your life, but sometimes it could be pretty engrossing to watch an episode unfold, especially if there were unexpected variations in the script.”
“If it had been a movie, he probably would have been moved by it, but it was reality, and he was a little bewildered and kind of irritated.”
Displaying 1 - 30 of 163 reviews