Books: Connecticut Gamut

BLANDINGS’ WAY (314 pp.)—Eric Hodgins—Simon & Schuster ($3).

Mr. Standings had at last finished building his Connecticut dream house. As he commuted between his country acres and his Madison Avenue office, Blandings got to thinking that it wasn’t really enough just to own a house. A man ought to pull his weight in the community. What happened to fiction’s famous flannel-brained Manhattan adman in the social & political briers of rural New England is the lightsome burden of Blandings’ Way, FORTUNE Editor Eric Hodgins’ sequel to Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

The second book of Blandings is not so homely-timely as the first, but it will probably have just as big a popular success; it is a Book-of-the-Month Club pick for October, and contains almost as many situations for Gary Grant and Myrna Loy as Dream House did.

The first thing Blandings did as a Community-Conscious Citizen was to take a wild rush into local politics. He tripped at the first step, and fell into a seat on the school board. Then somebody shoved a failing small-town newspaper into his arms, and lit out for the Coast. Blandings rashly began a flaming editorial crusade for oleomargarine in the heart of the Connecticut dairy country.

“Communist! Crackpot!” howled his political opponents, and Blandings was on the run. He ran the gamut of local political pitfalls before he was through, and landed in most of the social & economic ones too. At last, weary and harried but doing his best to look like Moses leading his people through the Wilderness, Blandings sold his dream house and brought his family back to a Manhattan apartment. “Just think,” his wife sighed happily, “out “of a side bedroom window you can catch a little glimpse of Central Park.”