A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Become the Dream You Want To Have

Lowell Lake is a nebbish, the Yiddish concept of ‘someone who, upon walking into a room. makes it feel like someone has just left.’ Or as Davis puts it: “a tiny, dim meteor in an empty matchbox.” Lowell is essentially invisible, even to himself, especially to himself: “in his eating club, he was the chairman of the committee that cleaned up after parties.” Indeed, he is always cleaning up... after himself. It’s not that he doesn’t care; he is acutely, meticulously aware of his ignorance: “he was definitely aware that something was expected of him. He wished he knew what it was.”

Lowell is comically hapless in the way we are all hapless: the reasons we pretend determine our actions are either rationalisations or archaic as soon as they are expressed. He gets to Stanford University by mistake, married by momentum, moves to Manhattan through a misunderstanding, and then on to Brooklyn as the result of a disastrous miscalculation; he becomes an editor of a trade monthly more or less by accident. Lowell exists in a fog: “A lot of things hadn’t occurred to him. He was paying for them now. Sometimes he wondered if he was even paying for things he didn’t know about.” Don’t we all?

Lowell is a reverse pioneer, returning East over the Sierras, the Rockies, and the Central Plains from whence his forbears came, to take up residence in a new kind of empty wilderness, a New York apartment in which “All traces of prior human occupancy had been obliterated.” He could be described as living in the moment. But that might imply that there was some excitement to be found in his attentive perception. This there was not. Lowell is, quite understandably, bored to tears by his own company. His wife by all accounts feels the same way about him. Their life of quiet desperation is as tense as that of any pioneer.

Lowell doesn’t really like himself. He believes that he would like himself in different circumstances. So, true to form, he goes about changing circumstances - thinking, drinking, clothes, yield nothing new. Anything requiring talent - writing, painting, and so forth - were non-starters. But the one thing pioneers are notoriously good at - moving to a new address - occurs to him as just the ticket for personal salvation. No training required. Essential relationships - work, home, friends - don’t have to be compromised. And isn’t this, moving on physically, the real All-American solution to psychological problems? The practical core of the American Dream?

So like millions of past migrants, Lowell up-sticks from Manhattan to that unknown land, that Lebensraum , that Canaan across the East River, that outer borough known as Brooklyn. In Brooklyn a man can be a man. In Brooklyn there was space and potential. Sure there was also criminality and organised gangs of natives, and political chaos; but that is the nature of the frontier. Brooklyn offered a (not overly adventurous) adventure. Through adventure one might carve a future. Or so Lowell’s inarticulate fantasy suggested. The fact that Brooklyn was also the place that his wife was trying throughout her life to escape from was a small hurdle to be overcome. What pioneering spouse had really ever wanted to follow her husband into the wilderness?

Thus unfolds a scenario that we Walter Mitty-types know only too well. The disappointments, the unexpected consequences, the basic unpleasantness of the process of becoming who we think we ought to be. On the one hand, this process demonstrates the pervasive tragedy of all human ambition. On the other hand, it is also really very funny to watch ourselves and our families gradually turning into our parents and siblings. It is certainly a remedy for that condition captured in another Yiddish word: Chutzpah .

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