cover image Hammer. Nail. Wood.: The Complusion to Build

Hammer. Nail. Wood.: The Complusion to Build

Thomas Glynn. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, $17.95 (220pp) ISBN 978-1-890132-06-4

The impulse behind this book is good: a meditation by an inexperienced but enthusiastic narrator on building his own house. But while it is more intimate than Tracy Kidder's House, the inevitable plumb line for house books, it oversteps intimacy into preciosity. For Glynn (The Building), building is less a workaday experience and more a metaphor that allows esoteric descriptions of how carpentry is like sex, or rambling pseudo-spiritual musings in which thinking about how to repair a drain pipe turns into ""I do not remember making that repair, though I must have. I do remember something else though. The sky opened. I saw something. I saw how miraculous everything was. Everything just was."" What Glynn lacks in building skills and knowledge, he makes up for in determination, and that is evident here. But in his effort to make the particular universal, his human characters become less memorable than his nails. Perhaps Glynn wants readers to relate better to an adjustable wrench with square jaws and a wooden handle framed in iron than to a local Korean War vet who skids down roads on his head and winds up stabbed by a young girl who pets bees. The book's ending brings little closure, neither for the house (which continues as Glynn's ongoing project) nor for the people who live in and around it. (May)