A Meaningful Life

L. J. Davis'sA Meaningful Lifeis 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. Real estate and redemption:A Meaningful Lifeis a ferociously funny and smart story of obsessive, disastrous, all-American romance.

L. J. Davis is an author and prizewinning journalist who has contributed to The New York Times, Mother Jones, and Harper’s, among other publications. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of a National Magazine Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of many books, including Motherless Brooklyn, You Don’t Love Me Yet, and The Fortress of Solitude, and is also the editor of The Vintage Book of Amnesia. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Toronto, Canada.