Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House

THE desire to buy an old house in the country and fix it up is a disease, like dipsomania, and apparently incurable, though not always so painful as Mr. Blandings’s attack. Everything happens to him that can happen to anybody, and more, one hopes, than does happen to anybody. He and Mrs. Blandings are like a couple of young trout in a school of pike. It is funny, and you laugh and laugh, but all the while your pocket book bleeds in sympathy with theirs. It is most horribly true. You read about Mr.

Hackett, and you say to your wife or husband, “That’s old Gouge to a T,” or about Mr. Retch, and say, “Remember what Mr. Chisel did to us?” Mr. Blandings among the lawyers, the architects, the contractors, the bankers, the carpenters, the plumbers, the neighbors — the methods change, but the end is the same: he is thoroughly trimmed.

And he is such a nice chap, following the gleam, but barking his shins all the time; watching his bank balance melt like butter on a hot plate, and wondering where he will get more butter. As Mrs. Blandings says plaintively in her diary, there is something wrong somewhere.

His story is simple. He and his wife see a “sweet old farmhouse,” nestling against a hill; they fall in love with it: they buy it. Then Mr. Apollonio charges them for telling them it is too decrepit to renovate, and they pay Mr. Perlasky to pull it down. They pay Mr. Funkhauser, an architect, for blueprints to modernize the house that is now no more, and engage Mr. Simms, an architect of saintly pa tience but still expensive, to superintend the building of a new house on the old site.

In the course of this glad-sad-mad chronicle Mr. Hodgins discloses himself as an accomplished novelist, with a shrewd eye and a deft touch. William Steig’s psychoanalytic drawings add greatly to the hilarity. Together they provide a complete antidote for dream-housing. But will it stop a single city person from buying a sweet old farmhouse in the country? Probably not.

ROBERT M. GAY