A Meaningful Life

L.J. DAVIS
is an author and prize-winning journalist who has contributed to
The New York Times, Mother Jones
, and
Harper's
, among other publications. A former Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of a National Magazine Award, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

JONATHAN LETHEM
is the author of seven novels, including
Motherless Brooklyn
and
The Fortress of Solitude
. He lives in Brooklyn and in Maine.

A MEANINGFUL LIFE

L.J. DAVIS

Introduction by

Jonathan Lethem

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

This can only be entirely personal for me, I have no way around it. Not least because in considering the matter of “the Brownstoners”—those straggling individuals and families, nearly all of them white, who, by laying claim in the 1960s to a few of the aging and tattered row houses in the neighborhoods on the periphery of downtown Brooklyn, set the groundwork for the disaster and triumph of Brooklyn's slow-motion gentrification, so full of social implications and ethical paradoxes, and trailing any number of morbid and comic life situations not unlike those depicted in L.J. Davis's three novels of Brooklyn—I am considering the matters of my own life. My parents were Brownstoners, and the complexly uncomfortable facts in the case, discernible behind Davis's Brooklyn novels and also behind Paula Fox's
Desperate Characters
and Thomas Glynn's
The Building
, are the facts of my childhood. These were the facts I eventually excavated in a long novel called
The Fortress of Solitude
, yet which no matter how deeply I dig, I will never completely demystify.

Not least, but not only. Writing about Davis's book is personal for me because L.J. Davis was my first writer, and by that I mean not in the sense of Lewis Carroll or L. Frank Baum, who were among the first writers I read, but that he was my first captive specimen. L.J. and his family lived on the next block (he still lives in the neighborhood, and so do I), and I was best friends with his son Jeremy. When I first conceived the wish to be a writer, the thought was pretty easily completed by the phrase: “like Jeremy's dad.” I liked what I saw. L.J. sat at the back end of an open, high-ceilinged parlor floor devoted to bookshelves. (That I alphabetize my books now is probably attributable to the fact that his were alphabetized.) His desk was massive—I think it had to be, to support the weight of his manual typewriter, which I recall as a piece of epic ironwork wreckage, something you'd seen driven around on the back of a flatbed truck in search of a vacant lot where it might be safely abandoned. In that office, when Jeremy and I weren't shooed away, I was introduced to the existence of the books of Thomas Berger, Charles Webb, Leonard Michaels, and Kingsley Amis (“I was happy to be called Brooklyn's Kingsley Amis,” L.J. once told me, “until I had the misfortune of being introduced to Kingsley Amis”), and to Leonard Cohen's
New Skin for the Old Ceremony
LP. These are all tastes I've retained, and the flavor of which seem relevant now to the pleasure I take in L.J.'s novels—rightly relevant, it seems to me, though I could never defy the associative force of childhood memory.

So, Davis's
A Meaningful Life
, along with the true literary thrill it offers on rereading, provides for me a shudder of recognition, or a whole series of shudders. In three of L.J. Davis's four novels, young men who can only be described as sick, chronically ill with self-knowledge of their prejudices and reservations, find their ambivalent fates manifest in scenes of brownstone renovation in downtown Brooklyn, where the joists and pillars of the grand and tempting old houses are too often rotten to the core. More than that of Fox's great novel, close to the bone though it cuts, is the world I dawned into when my parents moved to Dean Street. The dystopian reality of late 60s and early 70s outerborough New York City can be difficult to grant at this distance; these streets, though rich with human lives, were collectively damned by the city as subhuman, crossed off the list. Firehouses and police stations refused to answer calls, whether out of fear, or indifference, or both. As L.J. told me once, most simply: “Anyone who chose to move to the neighborhood was in some way crazy. I know I was.” How precarious this existence was—morally, sociologically, financially—was never exactly permissible to name outside of L.J.'s books, or at least not with such nihilistic glee.

L.J., by refusing to blur the paradoxes of racial and class misunderstanding in idealist sentiment, was “un-PC” before there was such a thing. By being so, he turned some of his neighbors against him, exemplifying a loneliness he, from evidence of his books, already felt as a innate life condition. That he also chose with his wife to adopt two black daughters to raise in his brownstone alongside their two white sons is a fact that still stirs me in its strangeness and beauty. I remember thinking even as a teenager that L.J. had made his home a kind of allegory of the neighborhood as a whole, perhaps partly in order that he might refuse to stand above or apart from it. Then again, with characteristic dryness (unforgivable in the eyes of some local parents), L.J. once awarded a friend of mine and Jeremy's the Dickensian nickname “Muggable Tim,” and recommended we avoid walking the streets with him. When after thirty-odd years of personal shame at such stuff I finally managed to open my mouth in
The Fortress of Solitude
, I had L.J. to thank.

L.J.'s novels, like those of Berger and Webb—as well as those of Bruce Jay Friedman and a few other contemporaries—could be fitted into the uncomfortable category of the Black Humorists, an unaffiliated clan of writers who strained European existentialist angst through residual American optimism, arriving at a mordant hilarity just shy of doom. I call the category uncomfortable because nearly any writer ever associated with the label disavowed it, and while most were critical darlings (Davis was), too many bumped to the lower rungs of the mid-list (certainly Davis did). If a concocted literary “movement” doesn't sell books, what good is it? In any event, most of these writers could be called sons of Nathanael West, but unlike West, giddily free of the formal pressure of modernist aesthetics. In L.J.'s case, he appears to have tempered his West with a jigger of West's brother-in-law, S.J. Perelman, or even of P.G. Wodehouse. “I
like
slapstick,” L.J. recently told me, as if guiltlessly confessing a murder.

L.J.'s family home also gave evidence of a fanatical interest in world history, which had been Davis's major at Stanford. He and Jeremy shared a fondness for antique lead toy soldiers, John Huston's adaptation of Kipling's
The Man Who Would Be King
, scrupulously realistic board-game re-creations of European wars, and the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser. Born in Seattle but raised in Idaho, L.J. explained in a typically caustic autobiographical statement (written for the jacket of his first novel,
Whence All But He Had Fled)
:

The context of American history, its grand themes of Manifest Destiny and Manifest Disappointment, are terrifically relevant to
A Meaningful Life
, the most pointed and severe of L.J.'s novels of Brooklyn. It is precisely this undertow of pioneer failure that gives the book its oxygen and reach, and which make it undismissable, more than just a brilliant complaint or comic-existentialist howl in the night. By the description of his hero Lowell Lake's failing attempt to pen a novel of—surprise!—“the founding and settlement of Boise, Idaho,” and by various other nearly subliminal keynotes (Lake suffers his premarital jitters at Donner Pass), we come to see Lake's disastrous reverse-pilgrimage into Brooklyn, the easy destruction of his tissue-paper WASP idealizations upon immersion in the racial boiling pot of the inner city, in terms of an American incapacity or unwillingness to meet the true implications of its founding promises, made to itself and to the future. Every arrival aimed at some golden San Francisco of the mind falls leadenly short, landing in a Boise of regret and loathing. In this, Davis's America opens unexpectedly into Kafka's unattainable Castle, and the Zeno's paradox hopes of breaching its doors.

In Davis's helpless vision, West collapses into East, the American future into the bloodstained European colonial past. Plus the contractor you hired just wrenched out and demolished the irreplaceable Carrara marble mantelpiece, without asking.

—JONATHAN LETHEM

A Meaningful Life

FOR JUDITH

 

“This is the place. Drive on.”

—BRIGHAM YOUNG

“Brigham, Brigham Young,

It's a miracle he survived,

With his roaring rams,

And pretty little lambs

And his five and forty wives.”

—OLD IDAHO FOLK SONG

Lowell Lake was a tall man, rather thin, with thin sandy hair and a distant, preoccupied though amiable disposition, as though the world did not reach him as it reaches other men and all the voices around him were pleasant but very faint. His attention was liable to wander off at any time and he was always asking people to repeat things. He gave the impression that people bored him, although not in a bad way: actually, they seemed to lull him. He was frequently discovered half-asleep at his desk, gazing vacantly out the nearest window.

One morning not long after his thirtieth birthday, Lowell woke up with the sudden realization that his job was not temporary. It was as though a fiery angel had visited him in his sleep with a message of doom, and he leaped from bed in a state bordering on panic, staring wildly about him. His job wasn't temporary and things weren't going to get any better—not that they were going to get any worse, barring some unforeseen catastrophe like atomic warfare or mental illness, but they weren't going to get any better. That was the whole point. He'd found his level, and here he was, on it. He was the managing editor of a second-rate plumbing-trade weekly, a job he did adequately if not with much snap. It was, he realized with a dull kind of shock, just the sort of job for a man like him. Someday he might rise to the editorship, either of the plumbing-trade monthly or of something exactly like it. Big deal. But it was all he was good for, and he was stuck with it.

“What did you say?” asked his wife sleepily, rolling over in bed and peering at him from under her hand.