If You Had A Hammer

By John Skow

THE WALLS AROUND US

by David Owen

Villard; 308 pages; $21

The city man who moves to the country lugs along a cargo of rustic dreams, all calamitous. As writer David Owen, an escaped New Yorker now living in the white clapboard town of Washington, Conn., says in the first sentence of this terrifying confessional memoir, "I love buying expensive power tools and using them to wreck various parts of my house."

Just so. Do-it-yourselfers, it is now recognized, are not morally stunted; we are merely ill. Our hands tremble as we pass a display of belt sanders in a hardware store. If this sounds exaggerated, consider Owen's passionate discussion of "The Joy of Joint Compound." He writes that "once, when I was resurfacing the ceiling of my daughter's bedroom, I stepped down from the stool on which I had been standing and into an open bucket of joint compound. The smooth white material felt cool and luxurious against my foot, which, as luck would have it, was bare." Mental-health professionals and spouses of Skilsaw fondlers will recognize that luck had nothing to do with it.

Kinky or not, Owen is clearheaded about house behavior. "When a new family moves into a house," he says truthfully, "water begins to drip from the chandelier." The new householder either pays local artisans or ruins things himself. Owen doesn't exactly tell you how, but he gives you enough information (in the "Fear of Lumber" chapter) so that the guys in bib overalls at the lumberyard won't sneer. He is especially good on roof slopes and pitches and household electricity. Owen strums his mandolin in praise of electric miter saws ("Yeah, if you can afford one," says a young carpenter who leafed through this book) and electronic levels ("Nah," says my source).

The writing is brisk and funny where it is not tragic, though a bit heavy on "yikes" (as in, "For every human being on earth, there are 1,500 lbs. of termites. Yikes!"). It was Little Orphan Annie who said, "Yikes." Maybe Owen could alternate a few "arffs" in his next book, for Sandy. J.S.