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A Meaningful Life
[Paperback - 2009]
jonathan lethem
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Category: Fiction
Sub-category: Literary Fiction
Additional Category: Contemporary Fiction - Humorous Fiction
Publisher: Nyrb Classics | ISBN: 9781590173008 | Pages: 232
Shipping Weight: .261 | Dimensions: 5 x .4 x 7.9 inches

Description

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.

About the Author

Lawrence James Davis, better known as L. J. Davis, was an American writer, whose novels focussed on Brooklyn, New York.Davis's novel,A Meaningful Life,described by the Village Voice as a "scathing 1971 satire about a reverse-pioneer from Idaho who tries to redeem his banal existence through the renovation of an old slummed-up Brooklyn town house", was reissued in 2009, with an introduction byJonathan Lethem. Lethem, a childhood friend of one of Davis's sons, praised the novel in an essay about Brooklyn authors, which resulted in New York Review Books Classics reprinting it after nearly 40 years.Davis has been a resident of Brooklyn since 1965. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975 to write fiction, but then began to write journalism, notably forHarper's Magazine.Davis died at his home in Brooklyn on April 6, 2011.

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