I had never heard of L. J. Davis until I searched out his black-comic novel, A Meaningful Life. It's about a young man named Lowell Lake from Boise, Idaho who moves to Brooklyn (as did the author himself) and buys a decrepit mansion in a newly gentrifying section of Bedford-Stuyvesant that was eventually to be dignified and upgraded into Boerum Hill. In his endeavor to repair the building, everything that could go wrong, goes wrong — and does so in inventive, unpredictable ways.
If it's a satire, as it's sometimes called, A Meaningful Life is not gentle, Menippean or Horatian, but, rather, far beyond the outer limits of Juvenelian. It's nasty, and sometimes falls into just plain ugly. It reads less like a novel than as an extended turn by a stand-up monologist or comedian. Plot and character are regularly sacrificed to jokes. It has the saddest ending of any novel I can recall reading
Lowell Lake is afraid of "Negroes" and doesn't much like Puerto Ricans or Jews or gays (whom he calls "fruits," and "fags") or old people, and he, and the author, indulge themselves in brutal stereotyping.
It's one of the bleakest books I've ever read, and, if you hold your nose, one of the funniest.
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