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<![CDATA[A Meaningful Life]]>
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L. J. Davis’s <i>A Meaningful Life</i> is a blistering black comedy about gentrification and its discontents, a gritty picture of the collapsing New York of the 1970s, a prophetic send-up of middle-class anxieties and ambitions. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Davis’s 1971 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 decaying and crime-ridden section of Brooklyn, and against all advice, not to mention his wife’s exasperated remonstrations, sinks his every penny into buying it. He quits his job, moves in, and spends all his time on demolition and construction. His mission in life is to restore this house to its past grandeur, to dig up its lost history. This American boy wants to fix what’s gone wrong with his life. He wants to make good, and he will even murder to do it.<br> <br>Real estate and redemption: <i>A Meaningful Life</i> is a ferociously funny and smart story of obsessive, disastrous, all-American romance.
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10
3
2009
A Meaningful Life
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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 ...more...]]>
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I realized about 20 pages in that it was probabl...more...]]>
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Jonathan Lethem recommended this...more...]]>
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Since I was raised in Idaho and spent 20 some years not far from Boise I totally understood the Boise references, attitude and need...more...]]>
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The parts dealing with Brooklyn are a disturbingly accurate picture of life there in the bad old days.]]>
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