Maximal Minimalism

David Markson, Vanishing Point

I came late to the books of David Markson. It was David Foster Wallace's admiration for Wittgenstein's Mistress that piqued my curiosity in the work of this strange and haunting writer/collageist--yes, it feels at times as if Markson, like Joseph Cornell or Arthur Dove ("The Intellectual"), is patching his prose works (hardly novels in any conventional sense) together out of bits and pieces of intellectual history, biographical facts shorn of any context, and surreal meditations on isolation, alienation, and art.  One doesn't "read through" Wittgenstein's Mistress or, my favorite of his books, Vanishing Point, so much as think about the aphoristic sentences that constitute his  disconnected litanies of prose--'litany' seems right, as his books are evocations of something deeper that are created through a form of what feels like prayer or chant, in a language which can be as opaque as Latin or Greek is to the cathechumen.  Just as one might carry Wittgenstein's Tractatus about in a backpack on a tour of Europe, pausing in a cafe or train station for a bit of intellectual refreshment, one does well to tote Markson to the subway or the bus stop, or, as I prefer, to meetings at work where the need for distraction is most deeply felt.  I admit that like some of Wittgenstein and much of Nietzsche (like the aphorisms from Twilight of the Idols), sections of Markson strike me as non sequiturs--thoughts that lead no where, that don't have the power of philosophy or the beauty of literature, and that force me to shake my head in wonder that someone like Markson could be published in the first place.  But that's a rare feeling, and not altogether a bad one.  One can always "curl up with a good book;" what one wants, often, is to be discomfited by a difficult one.

The "plot" of Vanishing Point is simple: a character named simply "Author" sets out to write a novel by adjusting shoe boxes full of notes in some arbitrary fashion (the logic of composition is implicit in the text of the novel and cannot readily be described: it makes itself manifest).  As with Markson's other works--Reader's Block and especially This is Not a Novel--much of the wonder and beauty of the writing emerges from the reader's personal and idiosyncratic interpretation of the possibility that some logic binds the isolated sentences of the book together.  Markson requires his readers to locate the thematic links, or rather challenges his readers to build the novel out of Bruchstücke, rubble.

"The reading or non-reading of a book--will never keep down a single petticoat.  Said Byron.

"Stevie Smith's cheerfully gruesome voice, Robert Lowell called it.

"There are no English critics of weight or judgment who consider Mr. Joyce an author of importance.
Said Edmund Gosse, two years after the publication of Ulysses."

One thing you do when you read Vanishing Point is check out a lot of odd-ball quotations and assertions (yes, Gosse did make that absurd pronouncement).  You learn a good bit of literary history, and you work--hard--to push the tiny, at times indistinguishable pieces into a full puzzle, an image that is recognizable.  I have to admit that I knew what Wittgenstein's Mistress was about from Wallace's description; I had a sense of what the puzzle was to look like once it had been gerryrigged into shape by Markson, but even knowing the "story" of WM, I couldn't see it.  Vanishing Point, because it is about the process of making a book out of fragments--which is what one always does with Markson--is easier going.  Indeed, it is rather fun in parts: "Marianne Moore wore a Nixon campaign button."

Could a poet who drank (?) tea with Langston Hughes (what is the meaning of that face?) have come around to Nixon? Markson plagues you with bits of trivia like this, though most of the time getting to the truth doesn't seem trivial at all.  "Your eyes/flowers of ice"--could the poet who wrote this line really have admired Herbert Hoover?  I've read half-a-dozen articles on Moore's politics in JSTOR over the past several days and find that though a radical in poetics, Miss Moore was no radical.  But a Nixon button?

This porcupine-quilled,
   complicated starkness—
this is beauty—“a certain
   proportion in the skeleton
   which gives the best results.”
One is at a loss, however, to know
   why it should be here,
in this morose part of the earth—
to account for its origin at all;
but we prove, we do not explain
   our birth.

This is what Markson does to you, especially if you feel certain that literature must be more than just a passing fancy.  Like Ed McMahon, he feeds you a line and leaves you to make sense of it, or to get the joke: "What Giotto would make of a Gerhard Richter canvas."  A quasi-question like this one can't be ignored.  What would Giotto have said to this?

 I checked with Vasari an hour ago to find out what I could about Giotto's aesthetic vision: I hadn't read this bit of Vasari in thirty years.  I'm guessing Giotto would have admired Richter's energy but not his choice of subject matter.  And now I'm into Richter, an artist about whom I know next to nothing.  You see?  Markson may not take you on a journey with clear signposts, rounded characters, rising and falling action, and a fearful denouement, but he does force you to work with him, to construct the novel yourself.  In fact, by the end of Vanishing Point, you get the joke--you are the Author.  And what is the novel the Author has made?  Any novel he or she would like.


Here's a picture of Markson (on the left) with one of the other great, under-appreciated writers of the fifties and sixties, Frederick Exley.

I have Vanishing Point in a nice edition from Shoemaker and Hoard of Washington, DC but the good folks at Dalkey Archive, who never answer my emails, also publish most of his books.

George Ovitt (12/10/13)

A Cold Day in New Mexico

Proust and Karl Ove Knausgaard and Thank You

 

A lovely snowy day here in the high desert--just now the sky is clearing, but it has been snowing on and off since last night.  The mountains to the east of the city--the Sandias--are a bright and shimmering white and beginning just now (late in the afternoon) to shift in color--from glaring white to dull orange to shades of gray, a range of colors that varies with the angle of the sun and therefore with the day of the year.  It's getting cold, mid-20's Fahrenheit, and the snow that fell earlier--a wet mix of icy crystals--blötsnö in Swedish--is freezing on the branches of the Apache plume outside my window.  A nice time to read a couple of three-thousand-page books.

A month or so ago I entered into a pact with a good friend of mine to reread all of Proust--I'm into volume two now, reading the Terence Kilmartin revision of C.K. Scott Moncrieff's original version of Within a Budding Grove, which is a very loose rendering of Proust's far more poetic, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs--it's difficult to see how one could drop the "young girls" from the title since they are the point, Gilberte especially, but then while Moncrieff's genius as a translator can't be doubted, his tendency to employ Wordsworthian idioms in place of Proust's own has required some reconsideration and redaction.   I bought my original two-volume Englished Proust in Chicago in 1969; I went there for a demonstration against the Vietnam War and left with a book that changed my life.  That same year I read most of it in French, in the corrupt Pléiade edition, and since then I have read Swann's Way and certain sections from the other novels again.  But not the entire novel--the full one and one-half million words.  I began this rereading project a year ago but disliked the highly regarded Lydia Davis version of Swann and gave up after Combray. Kilmartain/Moncrieff seems to me a nice compromise with Proust's difficult language.  I won't be writing a review of this, the greatest novel ever written, but merely wish to observe that as one ages, the brilliance of Marcel's ruminations on the meanings of time, love, art, and loneliness only gain in power.  If you undertake Proust, give yourself a year.  Not only is Remembrance of Things Past (or, better, The Search for Lost Time) a long book, it is by turns demanding and tedious; in any case, it requires thoughtful reading.  If you can, read it with a friend and exchange confidences regarding your sense of what Swann really thinks of Odette, or of what Marcel finds lacking in Berma and attractive in Gilberte.  Nothing in Proust is earth-shattering; all he has to offer is life itself. 

And so does the Norwegian literary sensation Karl Uve Knausgaard.  I won't lie, I've only just started reading My Struggle.   Zadie Smith, whom I admire, mentioned that she was reading Knausgaard in an essay I happened upon in the New York Review of Books.  I started volume two (A Man in Love) a week ago and have been reading it obsessively (which is one reason I haven't been writing much here).  Peter Nash and I had a long talk about KUK yesterday--he isn't sold on the notion that My Struggle is Proustian, nor am I, but I do think that the idea of a writer using his (average) powers of observation, training them on (average) events and reporting them in what is, at least in translation, flat, uninflected, and pretty boring prose is oddly fascinating.  It's as if Knausgaard was the Cartesian soul, perched in the pineal gland, recording the slightly incomprehensible actions of himself, his children, and his long-suffering wife.  One is eavesdropping, but that's true of all memoirs; the difference is that memoirs never feel truthful to me in the way that My Struggle feels truthful.  I am a husband and a father myself, and most of my life is as mundane and boring as Knausgaard's life--like him I spend hours a day wishing I could write instead of attending to the chores of adult life.  Proust had no nappies to change, no arguments with a spouse to fret over, no children's birthday parties to attend.  One can no more imagine Marcel playing hide and seek in an amusement park with his daughters than one can imagine him not adoring Odette.  Knausgaard gives us life without art--artless life.  And his books aren't documentaries either; they have no point to make, no message, no ideological ax to grind (I can't find a deeply felt opinion, political or otherwise, in what I've read so far).  Knausgaard isn't Proust, but how could he be?  Perhaps his books have been praised more than they deserve, but, as with Galworthy's Forsyte Saga or Scott's The Jewel in the Crown, if this is soap opera, so what?  I plan to read all six volumes, in parallel with Proust--7000 pages--and maybe then I'll take on Trollope.   

That's the last page of The Past Recaptured.

This is not the last page of Talented Reader.  Peter and I wanted to thank our readers for their interest and for their support.  This blog began almost a year ago with the recognition that, at least in the popular press, many fine works of fiction and much great poetry goes unrecognized.   Our goal is to arouse interest in writers who otherwise might not be known to our readers.  Over the past year Peter and I have read a lot, talked a lot about books, and written over one-hundred-twenty-five posts on at least that many fine books.  It's been a blast.  As I wrote at the outset, neither Peter nor I are professional reviewers, nor are we on anyone's payroll, nor are we obliged to any publisher, or committed to any type of fiction.  We love good books and hope to share this love with you.  Thanks for reading. 


George Ovitt (12/5/13)

Why The Healing Gods Are Twins

                                                    Die Welt ist weit, die Welt ist schön,

                                                    wer weiss ob wir uns widersehen.

                                                    The world is wide, the world is beautiful

                                                    who knows if we shall meet each other again.

The Twins by Tessa de Loo 

Riddhi and Siddhi, Romulus and Remus, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu, Pemba and Musokoroni, Yama and Manu, Castor and Pollux, Jacob and Esau: world mythology is replete with such contentious, if complimentary, twins. Alternately cursed and revered, they are doppelgängers, alter egos; they are light and darkness, good and evil, halves of some strange,  uncanny whole. What is interesting is the extent to which twins, for all their legendary accursedness, have been linked to the salubrious, the healthful, the good. “It has long been noted in folklore, mythology, and religion, that a pair of divine or saintly twins were often associated with the healing arts,” writes Leon D. Hankoff in his fascinating essay, ‘Why the Healing Gods are Twins’. No wonder that healing—that of two sisters separated by war—lies at the heart of Dutch author Tessa de Loo’s internationally acclaimed novel, The Twins. 

The story opens in the present day, in the Belgian city of Spa, a resort town made famous by Pliny the Roman and Tsar Peter the Great, by Descartes, Christina of Sweden, and the Count of Orléans, where the principle character, an elderly Dutch woman named Lotte, has been sent by her children to take the cure for her arthritis, to relax and enjoy the health-giving waters.  There, one morning, while resting in the clinic between pristine sheets, she is torn from her reverie by the grating sound of German: “Goodness me, what is this, a morgue?”

Instinctively, she slid deeper into the bed.  The language the woman had made the inappropriate remark in was German. German! What was a German doing here, in Spa, where every square, every public garden, had a monument with lists of the fallen of two world wars carved in stone? Her own country was swarming with health resorts? Why Spa?

Hoping the “elderly Walküre” will simply leave her alone, Lotte does her best to ignore her, closing hers eyes and breathing deeply, but to no avail. When the bumptious woman inquires in French as to whether or not the water in the bottles on the table is safe to drink, Lotte makes the mistake—a reflex, a yearning?—of responding to the woman in German, perfect German. “Ach so! You’re German!” exclaims the German with delight, and the fuse between them is lit.

So begins this deeply gratifying tale of the painful reunion of two sisters, twins, separated in their youth by World War II, then drawn together again by chance, by arthritis, by fate. In a style and setting reminiscent of Mann’s Magic Mountain, Lotte and her sister, Anna—one Dutch, one German—grope their way back through the past, through the layers of guilt and longing and recrimination.

The setting is significant, both symbolically and logistically; pinched tightly between Germany, the Netherlands, and France, Belgium (in particular the famous healing resort of Spa) is the perfect stage for this humble, if allegorical reunion, an intermediate and relatively neutral corner of Europe that is nonetheless deeply scarred by the cataclysmic history of Europe. Writes Tony Judt, “There are probably more battlefields, battle sites, and reminders of ancient and modern wars in Belgium than in any comparatively sized territory in the world.” 

Bit by bit, between peat and carbonated baths, over coffee and pastries, and in the course of their many and aimless walks through the damp and wintry streets, Lotte and Anna struggle slowly, tentatively, in the course of this fine novel, to unravel the tangled history that binds them—as Germans, as sisters, as twins.   

Tessa de Loo (b. 1945) is a Dutch writer whose novel The Twins has been translated un 25 languages.  She is also the author of The Book of Doubt (2013). Splitting her time between Portugal and France, she is one of the most successful writers in the Dutch language.

* “Why The Healing Gods Are Twins” was published in The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 1977. 

Peter Adam Nash

Up on the Roof

The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al Aswany

No doubt you've had the experience of walking down city streets or standing at a hotel window and imaging the lives being lived in the buildings around you.  With any luck, now and again, you might get a quick glimpse into someone's living room, or see a family just sitting down to dinner.  You're not a voyeur (or perhaps you are), in any case you enjoy the thrill of observing other lives "in the moment," no matter how ordinary those lives, or how like your own. As a fictional device, peering through open windows and doors, touring apartment buildings and hotels, violating the privacy of others, can be deployed with great skill and subtlety or in a ham-handed fashion--Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual or Arthur Hailey's Hotel.  I suppose it would be a stretch to point to Dante's Divine Comedy as the source of this voyeuristic tradition (Hotel Hell); more likely candidates would come from the modernist tradition, from Baudelaire perhaps, or from flâneurs like Walter Benjamin--from books like the Arcade Project or Edmund White's love songs to Paris--the stroller, idle, searching for "adventures," usually romantic, peering through open windows, intruding upon the lives of others.

That's the Yacoubian Building in Cairo, the setting for the vastly entertaining novel by Alaa Al Aswany, a bestseller in Egypt, a novel that places within one space the interwoven lives of two dozen characters, from an impoverished doorman to a playboy millionaire.  It's an engaging book, full of sexual longing, abortive ambition, political intrigue, and urban voyeurism.  The trajectories--tragic in the case of some of the denizens of the Yacoubian Building and comic in the case of others--are set out with precision and care in the first pages.  The young, idealist Taha el Shazli wishes to be a police officer but has to overcome the poverty of his upbringing (his is the saddest story of the lot); the ambitious tailor Malak who understands how to game the underground economy to get ahead; Zaki Bey el Dessouki whose amorousness is insatiable and whose pursuit of pleasure is sadly comic; Souad Gaber, second wife of the wealthy and ambitious Hagg Muhammad Azzam--she loathes her husband but tolerates him for her son's sake.  There's a bit of melodrama in all of these stories, a sense of "God's plenty," but never any banality--I wondered while reading The Yacoubian Building if I would have found the novel as enchanting if it had been set in New York or Albuquerque--probably not. The power of the book derives in large measure from its setting in Cairo in the 1980's, just prior to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.  This is a world I know, in small part, from Mahfouz (whose novels, like the Cairo Trilogy, are, however, set in an earlier period) from reading contemporary Egyptian history, and from having seen this past summer half-a-dozen contemporary Egyptian films.  The small details of life in this teeming city made this novel especially attractive, so much so that I abandoned all of my other reading projects as well as my paid work to follow the charming and sad lives lived in the Yacoubian Building.  There were moments when I surprised myself by flipping ahead in the story to see what would happen (to Taha mostly)--I'm not usually so engaged by mere stories that I cheat--I even read the last five pages long before I had a right to, something I haven't done since reading Natsuo Kirino's Out and being so eager to see how she would resolve her tale that I took a peek at the last page.  Al Aswany was, maybe still is, a dentist by profession.  What could be more quotidian than looking in people's mouths?  What more natural training could there be--far better than the pointless MFA--than dentistry for the dissection of human existence?

Al Aswany is the most popular contemporary novelist in Egypt and among the most popular in the Middle East.  Born in 1957, he became, during the eighteen days of Tahrir Square, "the face of the Egyptian Revolution."  His political views are controversial both in Egypt, where he has been an opponent of the two regimes that replaced Mubarak, and in the United States where he has been attacked by the center-right New Republic and the far-right Blaze as an "anti-Zionist conspiracy theorist. "  I'll leave the name-calling to the pundits and merely mention that the politics of Al Aswany's fiction appear to me to be even-handed--ironic and Voltarian rather than ideological.  His public statements are, of course, his business, as are his personal political views.  He is, after all, a dentist and a writer and not a politician.

The Yacoubian Building, translated by Humphrey Davies, is published by Harper Perennial.

George Ovitt (11/24/13)

  

Critics Be Damned

The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump by Aharon Megged

Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme.

   

                                 Rabelais

“Asking a working writer how he feels about critics,” declared English playwright, John Osborne, “is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.” So might have gone the epigraph to this witty, erudite, ever-surprising exploration of the age-old relationship between writer and critic.  

My first taste of Aharon Megged’s work was his novel Foiglman, and I was so impressed by the strange and melancholy tale of an Israeli historian named Zvi Arbel and his anguished, ultimately tragic relationship with Foiglman, a Yiddish poet and Holocaust survivor, that I’d bought up every book in his name. Among them (and the subject of this post) was the curiously titled novel, The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump. Set in an apartment building in 1980’s Tel Aviv, it tells the story of a writer named Kalman Keren who makes the horrific discovery one day that his arch-enemy, the literary critic, Naphtali Schatz, has not only moved into his apartment building but into the apartment directly overhead!

Keren, having just started work on what is to be his masterpiece (the book to end all books, the ultimus liber), in short, the translation into modern Hebrew of François Rebelais’ five interconnected scatological novels, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, suddenly finds himself paralyzed by the presence of this literary specter, this “Mr. Bookflayer,” this “degenerate descendent of Zoilus the Scourge.” It is too much for the hapless writer to believe: “Impossible!—I repeated to myself—the devil has tricks no mortal can imagine, but in the field of literature?! It’s inconceivable that he would think up an allegory like this, a literary critic living right above a writer, walking on his head, as it were. Especially a critic whose first book was a polemic against allegory!”

Brilliantly, the antipathy Keren feels for the critic is rooted, not in some harsh or captious review he’d received from the man, but in the unendurable fact that the widely esteemed Schatz never even acknowledged his last, most successful book, The Flying Camel of the Golden Hump, let alone reviewed it. “Twenty-eight articles written about this book of mine in six months after it was published. But Schatz—not a word!” It is a slight, a damnation, further compounded by the fact that the critic—now his neighbor—refuses even to greet him on the stairs. 

Stymied each day in his effort to make headway on his magnum opus by the machine-gun clatter of Schatz’s typewriter upstairs, and humiliated by the thought of the critic’s daily sewage gurgling past him through the pipes in the wall, Keren decides to exact his revenge upon the cocksure man, both by means of his disarmingly kind and sensuous wife, Naomi, who has made no secret of her interest in Keren and his work, and by viciously satirizing the man and every critic in Israel like him—the very tale this novel tells. Yet The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump is also the story of Keren himself—of his emigration from Romania, of his brief marriage and divorce, and of his life as a writer in Israel. Clever, allusive, punditic, it is delightful to read, a story, finally, about the wonder of wonders, that of literature itself.

Aharon Megged was born in Poland and came to Palestine at the age of six. He was a member of Kibbbutz Sdot Yam from 1938-1950, and later, a literary editor and journalist. He has been a pivotal figure in Israeli letters since the 1950’s.  His many novels, short stories, and plays reflect the complexities of Israeli society over the past fifty years.  He has won many literary awards, among them the Bialik Award, the Brenner Award, the Agnon Award, and the much-coveted Israel Price for Literature, 2003.  The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump is published by The Toby Press.  Check out their remarkable list at http://www.tobypress.com/.

Peter Adam Nash

House of the Dead in Bed-Stuy

A Meaningful Life, by L. J. Davis

 

     L. J. Davis's novel of absurdity, despair, and home repair--three topics linked in real life--reminded me at first of Kierkegaard's The Concept of Dred.  Lowell Lake of Idaho finds himself married and living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, working at a dead-end job as a technical editor, and drinking himself silly night after night.  Lake is the sort of person who drifts from one thing to another without volition, lacking energy, devoid of passion; he neither loves nor hates his wife, his job, or his life.  His existence is a fate he can neither embrace nor alter.  Although the novel is set in the middle 1960's--the Vietnam War unscrolls on television each night--Lowell pays no attention to politics or culture and appears to be one of those ethereal beings whose disconnection from the world  is absolute.  Davis uses scathing miniatures--Lake at home, Lake at work, Lake aimlessly wandering the streets--to convey his waifish "hero's" alienation from everyone and everything (to be fair, Lake's wife is herself a shadowy being about whom we know exactly three things: she's Jewish, has obnoxious parents, and wears a girdle--this is a one-man show). Inertness is the dominant theme of the novel's first hundred pages, that and a numbing sense of emptiness.  And, yes, Lake is annoying: he whines too much, drifts about in the way a pampered teenager might do, and refuses to "take hold."  In one witty section he notices, without a trace of feeling, that his wife is systematically throwing out all of his clothes and, indeed, during critical parts of the story, Lake must deport himself fully nude, like Adam, post culpa.  Lake is just the sort of self-hating narcissist one read about in the sociological classics of the 50's and 60's--The Organization Man, The Lonely Crowd, The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life.  We know that personal authenticity and identity were major American concerns in the 50's and 60's, perhaps even more so than today (it may not be an exaggeration to say that we've given up on the notion of authenticity and settled for spite).  I remember that my parents, who owned no more than half-a-dozen books, kept a copy of Norman Vincent Peale's longtime bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking on the coffee table, right next to a family Bible that was never opened. Everyone was trying, but without much luck.

"The relation of freedom to guilt is dread," wrote Kierkegaard, and this formulation might explain the American propensity for flirtations with meaninglessness indulged in by Lowell Lake and the millions of Americans who devour books like Peale's (or Billy Graham's, or the raft of other books designed to help us cope with our incredible good luck).  What can you do to fill up a life whose possibilities are endless?  You might finish up at Stanford (as Lake does) and hop in your car and drive anywhere--to New York!  And, back when such things were possible, you might rent a nice apartment, pick out a job from the many on offer, and commence a life whose luster quickly fades.  Is this all there is?  Perhaps we really believe the myth of "boundless freedom," or take our Whitman without irony--we sing of ourselves and celebrate ourselves, and worship our freedom without ever considering that dread lurks inside the bubble of self-regard we've constructed--our manifest destiny, our American melancholy. 

Kierkegaard gave up his fiance for obsessive writing about, well, his obsessions--sin mostly, and Christian identity, and the hypocrisy of his fellow Danes.  His books are one part Hegelian metaphysics, one part Christian apologetics, and more than one part melancholic self-examination.  But his mood, bleak as it may have been, was relieved now and again by flashes of wit and by an ironic sense of his own absurdity.  For this reason, after a while, I came to renounce the idea that Lowell Lake was a Kierkegaardian 'Knight of Faith' and began to see him as Dostoyevsky's Underground Man--"I, for instance, have a great deal of amour propre."  Lowell Lake might also have benefited from a slap in the face, or a kick in the pants.  But he's too obtuse to be humiliated; when his wife criticizes him, Lake misses the point, or fails to find an appropriate response: "Lowell opened his mouth, made a little sound, and closed it again for fear that nothing would come out but gibberish."  Post-modern psychology suggests that there is no fixed self, and no answer to the question "Who are we?"  But this is a bitter pill to swallow; our conviction that we are the voice in our head, the gestures we use to present ourselves to others, the poses we strike to gain acceptance is nearly impossible to overthrow.  The narcissist blots out the Other and refashions the world to suit his or her fantasies of the the self.  Or, maybe, he buys a rundown house in a decayed neighborhood and fixes it up.  Perhaps the American real estate fetish is the means through which a nation of self-regarding, anti-social egotists finds solace--in the House of the Dead.

So Lowell buys a house on a nightmarish block of Brooklyn.  A reeking, sewage-filled, ruin of a once-grand home--a metaphor, of course, for the ruin of the polis itself (this is the era of Jane Jacobs'  The Death and Life of Great American Cities), but for Lowell Lake the house is a chance at salvation--or authentication.  The problem is that he has to give up his wife and his sanity in order to rebuild his wreck of a house.  But as Kierkegaard was fond of reminding his readers, you must lose your life in order to save it, or, perhaps, you must take someone else's life, capriciously, without consequence, in order to find value in your own.

Here's Dostoyevsky: "We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.  We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better."

And Davis: "It all meant nothing whatever to Lowell.  Standing in the parlor of a house no longer his, listening to the voices of people whose lives were closed to him forever, contemplating a future much like his past, he realized that it was finally too late for him. Everything had gone wrong, and he had succeeded at nothing, and he was never going to have any kind of life at all."

I can't say I enjoyed this novel, but I read it avidly, laughed once in a while, congratulated the (unfortunately) deceased L.J. Davis on his ability to pull off such a thing--a tragicomedy involving real estate--and vowed never to move again.

A Meaningful Life is published by New York Review Books, with an appreciative preface by the reigning novelist-in-residence of Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem.

George Ovitt (11/8/13)