15 March 1997
The New York Times Book Review, March 16, 1997, p. 8.

# Mr. Pollan Builds His Dream House

The author wanted a place to write so he made one, then wrote a book about it.

> A PLACE OF MY OWN
> The Education of an Amateur Builder.
> By Michael Pollan. Illustrated. 320 pp. New York:
> Random House. $24.

By Verlyn Klinkenborg (Verlyn Klinkenborg is the author of Making Hay and The Last Fine Time.)

It occurred to me while reading A Place of My Own that Michael Pollan's new book was probably written in the tiny writing house in the woods whose construction it records: a neat circularity, but not too neat. Mr. Pollan leaves room at the end of the book -- a weep-hole, to use the cabinetmaker's term -- for an exit outward into the flow of time. The book closes with an evocation of "move-in day" that subsumes the past and makes possible the future, leaving the reader keenly aware of the actual, extra-literary, worldly ongoingness of Mr. Pollan's "simple, one-room outbuilding."

If you hike to the clearing above Walden Pond where Thoreau's cabin once stood, you find a vacancy bordered by stones, apt enough in the way the site thrusts you back upon Walden itself. But were you to happen accidentally upon Mr. Pollan's personal woods, there it would stand: a cedar-shingled writing house sheltering Mr. Pollan writing. Thoreau built a first draft of a cabin, a hut that was hauled away shortly after he left the pond and that soon collapsed into a cellar hole dug for it by Emerson's gardener. Mr. Pollan has built a collected-works kind of cabin, one that he says will "outlive my intentions for it in all sorts of unforeseeable ways." I found myself almost wishing Mr. Pollan had used the novelist's old-fashioned trick of looking forward in a concluding chapter at the prospect of his characters' lives. Mr. Pollan and his writing house are wed at the end of A Place of My Own. But will they be happy, and will the fruits of this wedding be many and prosperous? Only time will tell.

When a writer builds a house, even a 104-square-foot "uninsulated, unplumbed outbuilding," you take it for granted he'll build it with words. Yet for Mr. Pollan, a writer, editor and "radically unhandy man," the point of building his writing house with his own hands was to build it, so to speak, away from, if not quite against, words. " It is not easy," he says, "getting past words. Yet that is what I felt a growing desire to do, and what attracted me to making a building in particular." Like many writers, Mr. Pollan (his previous book was Second Nature) has grown up to do what he loves doing, without necessarily noticing the number of things it has prevented him from doing along the way. "Work," he writes, "is how we situate ourselves in the world, and like the work of many people nowadays, mine put me in a relationship to the world that often seemed abstract, glancing, secondhand. ... Nor did what I do seem to add much, if anything, to the shock of reality, and though this might be a dated or romantic notion in an age of information, it seemed to me this was something real work should do." Having married and moved to the country, with a baby on the way, Mr. Pollan found himself wanting not another line of work but a different angle on the work already at hand.

This he discovered the first time he walked his property looking for a place to put his writing house. "From out here," he writes, "the whole problem of site selection looked somewhat different. I realized I wasn't just looking for a view, but for something more personal than that -- a point of view."

One of the things that make Mr. Pollan such an attractive writer is the modest way he presents his discoveries. The word "epiphany" is just a little too large for his tool belt. Building his writing house himself "precisely because I was so ill-equipped to do so" was bound to lead to revelations of a personal kind. But instead of portentously assessing the gravity of each such moment -- making the world stop on its axis, as writers so often do when they stub a toe on the obvious -- Mr. Pollan takes what lay hidden a moment before and quietly turns it into an unobtrusive element in the texture of his world. The role he assigns himself here isn't that of buffoon, though slapstick dogs an amateur carpenter, or that of sage, though sagacity abounds in this book. Mr. Pollan takes the role of the self: deliberative, half-amused and tolerant. While fretting over the choice of his building site, he says, "Maybe I'm the kind of person who just needs to think all his second thoughts in advance." And though he has been many selves by the time the book ends, including " 'the Jewish fix-it man' ... a creature no more plausible than a unicorn," he is ultimately revealed as an optimist, whose good cheer begins at home and spreads outward.

Mr. Pollan carries a box of books to his nearly completed writing house, which stands glowing in the dark woods, and he says, "So this was the house for the self that stood a little apart and at an angle, the self that thought a good place to spend the day was between two walls of books in front of a big window overlooking life. The part of me that was willing to wager something worthwhile could come of being alone in the woods with one's thoughts, in a place of one's own, of one's own making."

As for getting away from words, the task was doomed from the start, and not merely because Mr. Pollan plainly intended to make a book about the building, built largely of bookshelves, that he was making. As a do-it-yourselfer, Mr. Pollan was caught between two men, Charles R. Myer, the Cambridge architect and friend who designed his writing house, and Joe Benney, a local "master of the material world, equally at home in the realms of steel, wood, soil, plants, concrete and machinery."

Much of this book's dynamic hangs on the conflict, actual and implicit, between architect and contractor. But the intellectual energy with which A Place of My Own bristles derives mainly from Mr. Pollan's forays into the publications and constructions of the architectural vanguard during the past century. His respect for the work that architects do is enormous but, as he discovers, often falsely grounded. He had thought that "the work of building engaged them in a dialogue with the world, while the rest of us are lucky to add our two cents to the conversation of culture. But apparently the prestige of that conversation is so great today that architecture, perhaps worried it was on its way to becoming dowdy and irrelevant, was desperate to find a place for itself nearer to the spotlit heart of our information society." This discovery was, as he admits, a setback: "I'd come to building looking for a way to get past words, only to learn from an influential contemporary architect that architecture was really just another form of writing."

Mr. Pollan's concerns are deeper than his allusions to the "age of information" and the "information society" suggest. Reading Le Corbusier and Robert Venturi, walking through Peter Eisenman's House VI, Mr. Pollan finds himself puzzled by the way architecture seems to have disenfranchised itself, to have thrown away its proprietary values. "lt seemed to me," he writes, "you wouldn't seriously argue that architecture was a language unless you'd forgotten the specific heft of a cool brick, or the smell of fresh cedar warmed in the afternoon sun."

But architecture -- like every other discipline -- can only deconstruct what it first converts into text, and it can make its own deconstructions look significant, no matter how impractical they may be, only by overvaluing what it purports to deconstruct. Throughout this book, Mr. Pollan tries, philosophically hopeless as this sounds, to isolate the building of his writing house from the toils of language. Or, to put it another way, he tries to restore language to proportion in the sensory world, to remind the reader that "our bodies were making meaning out of the world long before our language had a chance to."

These are deep matters, but what makes them deep is not the wrestling with language but the wrestling with the world. Out of so much that's valuable in A Place of My Own, I find myself admiring the irony, elegantly raised by Mr. Pollan, that for some writers in this age the task is to rescue experience from information, to save a kind of worldliness -- which includes the knowledge of handling words well -- from the relentless textualizing of a society that is interested only in representations of worldliness. It is Mr. Pollan's purpose to remind readers including himself that there's a dimensionality to the world that isn't merely 3-D.

[End]