Books: A Friend of Mine

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I WAS DANCING by Edwin O'Connor. 242 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $4.75.

Early in his career, before he made a killing with his novel The Last Hurrah, Novelist Edwin O'Connor wrote occasional radio scripts. That fact may perhaps explain why O'Connor's latest book has such a familiar ring. / Was Dancing sounds like nothing so much as a discarded sequence from "Allen's Alley."

O'Connor's hero is a gabby old stage Irishman named Daniel Considine. A former professional hoofer, he turns up suddenly one night at the home of his son in an unnamed city that is quite obviously meant to be Boston. Daniel has not seen or thought about his son in some 20 years, but he settles down in an upstairs bedroom to live out what promises to be a long and madding old age. In the eariy hours of the morning, before anybody else is astir, he can be heard shuffling through an old dance routine and quavering out the opening lines of his theme song: /'// tell you who's a friend of mine—It's Waltzing Daniel Considine!

Daniel's son regards his father with an eye as cold as a Boston cod. Encouraged by his wife, he decides to pack the old man off to a Catholic rest home, Saint Vincent's Smiling Valley. Such plot as / Was Dancing has is concerned with Daniel's infinitely crafty efforts to discourage his son and to remain on in the house as a nonpaying guest. But Novelist O'Connor is less interested in plot than in the smoky tang of Irish talk and in the embalmment of a cast of characters as Stereotyped as Mrs. O'Leary's cow—Father McGovern, an octogenarian priest who rejoices fiercely every time a parishioner precedes him to the grave; Al Gottlieb, a Jewish businessman who prattles like a borscht-circuit comic.

Novelist O'Connor, who wrote Dancing first as a play (it will be produced on Broadway in the fall), trots his characters on and off like the headliners in a vaudeville act. For the most part, Fred Allen did it better.