Around the House: Reflections on Life Under a Roof

In 1991, New Yorker staff writer Owen wrote his wonderful The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works. Or just as often, how it doesn't work. Now we find out just why he was inspired to write it in the first place. In 1985, Owen and his wife decided it was time to get out of their cramped Manhattan apartment and move to the country. Alone, he found an old house in Connecticut--what would be euphemistically called ""a handyman's special""--and bought it at once. When his wife first saw it she was appalled, but they decided to keep it and slowly, room by room, they began to renovate. The author sees an old house almost as a shoe, ""it needs to be tried on and worn for a while."" And wear it he does in 67 brief, whimsical essays that prove that a home is more than a house. Here Owen displays imagination (voila! and a refrigerator becomes a bookcase); inventiveness (outsmarting the droppings of pet rabbits); and a kind of practical sentiment (grandmother's old furniture serves as convenient decoration and evocation of happy memories). There are treatises about a video camera almost never used (""Memory is better than a video camera, because, in addition to being free, it doesn't work very well""), the importance of a room of one's own and how to bribe a child out of a used baby blanket with $5. Owen also fills us in on the mysteries of a Paris bidet, his apathy toward weeds and how to discipline a new puppy (bring it into the bed with you). Forget parents, kids, spouses, jobs, the ultimate love-hate relationship is with our houses, and this funny, eclectic collection recalls that full range of joy and annoyance. (Sept.)