House Happy (1958) by Muriel Resnik is one of the books I’ve bought for my Project 24 – I’d seen it every time I’ve been to Astley Book Farm, and I finally couldn’t resist and had to splurge a little to bring it home with me. The cover has a lot to do with it – as does the intriguing subtitle ‘A Tale of Mortgages and Mirth’. And it ended up being a lot of fun.
The cover is very accurate about the starting point of the novel – which begins with the bedframe you can see in the bottom left. Lucy Butler is a divorced mother of two who is drawn to elegance and beauty even when it is impractical. And one of the things that catches her eye is a beautiful French bedframe – which is only five dollars. By the time she’s got it delivered it costs several times that, and the chain of events it kicks off is extremely expensive. Because she decides she needs a new home to fit the bedframe – and sets her heart on one that she certainly can’t afford.
Lucy Butler reminds me a lot of Cornelia Otis Skinner’s essays – the same sort of amusement at being expected to take part in everyday life, and the same ability to get through it absurdly but in tact. While Skinner is very self-deprecating, Lucy seems to coast along on naivety and charm. She is certainly attractive to most men – particularly when she walks, which is a detail Resnik labours and which feels very of its time. (Allegedly her husband left her because she walked too seductively, which… ok.)
I kept thinking of other novels as I read House Happy, the trouble being that they’re not really household names and thus the comparisons might not be helpful. The tone is like Thorne Smith, albeit several notches less farcical; the sequence of events is rather like Eric Rabkin’s Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, though without the underlying sense of tragedy. It all feels a bit like a screwball comedy, tethered to the domestic.
My favourite scenes were when Lucy looked on as a helpless bystander, dizzied by proceedings, particularly when trying to exchange contracts as the housing solicitors (curious spellings Resnik’s own!):
They brought in a chair for me and had a terrible time finding room for it, and then the secretary started reading the most boring contract all about the party of the first part and the party of the second part and one of them was me but I don’t know which. And it was full of whereases and therefors and wherefors and so forth and Arthur kept interrupting with his silly ideas about changing a whereas to a wherefor or the other way round. Really he’s so petty and it was just terrible.
Similar confusion and frustration happens when she is trying to arrange garbage collection – a saga that I very much enjoyed. Many details of finding, buying, and moving into a new house haven’t really changed in the decades since Resnik this, though I doubt many of us find tens of thousands of dollars becoming suddenly available when we take a closer look at our property portfolios.
I haven’t mentioned any of the other characters, and it’s true that Lucy is the undisputed star, but I also enjoyed her cynical sister and her two teenage sons – one of whom is very excited about the move, and the other keeps trying to put obstacles in the way. And yes, there is a romance element, of course. It’s not the most convincing element, but I was happy to go along for the ride.
Overall, House Happy is a good mix of domestic detail and silliness, and I really enjoyed my time in House Happy. It’s too intentionally absurd in tone to have the sort of mimesis that appears in lots of novels about mid-century housewives and mothers – but it’s something different, and joyful.