Hammer, Nail, Wood: The Compulsion to Build

Hammer. Nail. Wood. is not quite a novel and not quite a construction manual, but it's a great read that will entertain and amaze while passing along a bounty of helpful information about how a post-and-beam house is put together. Readers who are experienced builders will grin with recognition, while aspiring builders will be given fresh insights into the joys and frustrations of the self-building process.

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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Weary of New York City, Glynn heads far upstate to a dreamy, near-forgotten county in sight of Canada. He bought a rundown farm there long ago and never did much with it. Now he's decided to build a house for no reason but to soothe his soul: he loves wood and old tools and the sizzle of nails driving into green lumber. Far the most unusual aspect of his amateur building is his insistence on hewing timbers right out of the woods: big maples and hemlocks, which he takes to a local sawmill and shaves into planks and beams. Such are the construction techniques of a hopeless romantic, and Glynn has almost nothing to offer by way of advice to a working carpenter. Rather, his short chapters are prose poems on forgotten values: the precision of chisels; the lonely lifestyle of a well digger; the admirable, stubborn Amish. Glynn's effort is a modest but charming turn down back roads, refreshing, even Thoreaulike in its sly rejection of practicality. John Mort