Eric Hodgins, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House

championship belts & dance diagrams

“It had successively but obscurely appeared that Mr. Hackett would not sell any of his property on Bald Mountain at any price; that he would sell part but not all, and only under incomprehensible circumstances; that he was open to any reasonable offer; and that he was unaware that any matter of sale was under discussion.”

Lately the concept of the Great American Novel has (like the concept of Heavyweight Champion of the World) balkanized. Minor belts of dubious prestige abound. The Great California Novel. The Great Prison Novel. The Great 9/11 Novel. The Great Internet Novel.

The Great Real Estate Novel seems, as a category, barely worthy of a belt (a commemorative mug, possibly), but its bearer is undisputed: Eric Hodgins’ Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. It’s the best and funniest book ever written about the whole humbling, ludicrous business of home ownership and renovation. It ought to come standard at closings, like the contract and the keys. 

I have the impression (based largely on the fact that the copy I purchased new appears to have been produced on someone’s home-printer) that no one reads it anymore. First published it 1946, it’s been overlaid in the public imagination by a couple of so-so movie adaptations. It’s a shame, and a puzzle, that the book was filmed once, let alone twice — it isn’t The Godfather or Gone With the Wind, which are fundamentally stories, and can therefore be transplanted from one medium to another without much sacrifice. The greatness of Mr. Blandings lies entirely in its light-footed, masterfully balanced prose. You might as well film a sonnet.

The book opens in Lansdale County, where Mr. and Mrs. Blandings have come in search of a farmhouse. The Blandings are newly flush with cash (“… Mr Blandings had been lucky enough to hit upon a three-word slogan for a laxative account that had broken four successive agency vice-presidents,”) and they have convinced themselves, or allowed themselves to be convinced, that they are one real estate purchase away from eternal contentment.

“… they knew, in a flash, what had been wrong with them all those years: the peace and security that only the fair land itself could provide they had left out of their lives altogether.”

But first they must contend with Ephemus W. Hackett, the last surviving inheritor of the two-hundred-year-old family home (“The wide oak planks of the floor, rounded and buckled here and there, and the magnificent hand-hewn beams…”) with which the Blandings have fallen in love.

The Blandings, having been consummate city people until ten minutes ago, expect Hackett to be a country bumpkin: quiet, simple, pure of heart. But he turns out (pulling up in a shiny Buick, blathering endlessly) to be something a good deal more troublesome — a cipher.

“The Hackett conversation, however, did not cohere; it was vacuous and shrewd, vague and incisive, by bewildering and unpredictable turns. Mr. Blandings almost immediately discovered that he did not know on what level the conversation should be pitched, nor even with what assumptions it should begin.”

Mr. Blandings and Eph Hackett circle each other warily for an hour (Mr. Blandings praises the trees; Hackett rants about FDR) and then Hodgins summarizes the state of play thus:  

“It had successively but obscurely appeared that Mr. Hackett would not sell any of his property on Bald Mountain at any price; that he would sell part but not all, and only under incomprehensible circumstances; that he was open to any reasonable offer; and that he was unaware that any matter of sale was under discussion.”

This sentence — with its woven sequence of contradictory scenarios (each one studded with some small delight) — makes me think of those old-fashioned diagrams of dance steps, a series of shoe-shapes arrowing their way around a page. 

Hodgins begins with the extreme and therefore clear situation of Hackett’s outright refusal to sell. The word obscurely promises more, but Hodgins begins, wisely, by grounding us in the simple. Then he waltzes us into the more complicated possibility of Hackett selling part but not all of his land (that incomprehensible circumstances is deliciously compact). And then, as a respite from the semicolons and ambiguity, he grants us a clause of only seven words that are as soothing to read as they must, for Mr. Blandings, have been to believe: he was open to any reasonable offer.

But before we’ve fully caught our breath Hodgins carries us into the dance’s final move, which is: a trap-door opens and we dancers plummet to our doom. That Hackett could, after all that, be unaware that any matter of sale was under discussion at all — this makes me laugh, in a cackling-while-plummeting sort of way, every time I read it. 

It’s amazingly rare, in literature, to see reflected the actual absurdity and inscrutability of so much human communication. Out of embarrassment, or anxiety about boring the reader, the authorial impulse is to clean things up, to impart at least a basic linearity to most conversations. Characters meet, words are exchanged, and here is the deliverable. But so often, in real life, what’s delivered at the end of a conversation is a puff of vapor, a headache-inducing fog. Hodgins has the confidence, and the elegance, to bring this diaphanous truth to the page. 

He isn’t Herman Melville, and he doesn’t aspire to be; his gaze is as unapologetically narrow as a Zillow listing. But his novel articulates one aspect of the human experience more truly and more shrewdly than anyone else has ever managed it. His championship belt is minor — tarnished, fading, stamped with obscure logos — but it is richly deserved.