A Meaningful Life

A Meaningful Life

1971 • 232 pages

Ratings1

Average rating5

15

I always read the best books in the strangest of ways. I put this book on my request list at the library and it finally came in for me a few weeks back. I piddled around and didn't get to it and when I tried to renew it, I saw that I couldn't as it was on hold for someone else. All this for a library book that looked so new the spine wasn't yet bent, but with a copyright date of 1971.

How could I resist trying to read it before I had to return it?

This book has my book friend KK's name all over it and there is just one good word to describe it: snarky. Lowell Lake goes to college, gets married, and moves to Brooklyn, all rather haphazardly, but it takes turning thirty to set him off on a quest for a meaningful life.

It's laugh-out-loud funny, but in a horribly mean sort of way. No cute puppies in this story. But it reads honest and true as well as funny which moves it way up there on my list of Books I Recommend.

Side note: It has been almost forty years, so I had to see what Mr. L.J. Davis was up to these days. Still alive, but not writing fiction, apparently. Did Davis ever find a meaningful life? How much of the book was autobiographical? And why no more fiction?

August 1, 2009Report this review