House

[New York Times review is here: http://tinyurl.com/7yt9wek ]
RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM
By Paul Goldberger; Paul Goldberger is the architecture critic of The New York Times.
Published: October 6, 1985

HOUSE By Tracy Kidder. Illustrated. 341 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $17.95.

THIS book is the story of the building of a house, and it is told with such clarity, intelligence and grace it makes you wonder why no one has written a book like it before. In the way that a well-told story of a marriage, or of a love affair or of a child's coming of age fills you with a sense that you are reading about a fundamental human experience for the first time, so it is with ''House.'' Tracy Kidder makes us feel with a splendid intensity the complex web of relationships and emotions that inevitably comes into play in the act of bringing a work of architecture to fruition. Mr. Kidder, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for ''The Soul of the New Machine,'' which might be called a humanistic quest into the world of computers, has written in this age of prolific architectural publishing one of the few books about building that is actually the story of people. It reads like a novel - not a thriller with startling twists of plot, but an old-fashioned narrative that proceeds, chapter by chapter, toward a conclusion that comes as no surprise but that still brings a sense of deep pleasure. It is a sign of Mr. Kidder's talent as a writer that we feel a great surge of emotion as Jonathan and Judith Souweine and their children walk into their new house for the first time.