Volume 2, Number 6 · April 30, 1964
Displaced Persons
By Julian Moynahan
I Was Dancing
by Edwin O'Connor
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 242 pp., $4.75
The Old Man and Me
by Elaine Dundy
Dutton, 255 pp., $4.50
Love You Good, See You Later
by Eugene Walter
Scribners, 193 pp., $3.95
The better novelists always seem to know how to make literary capital out of their limitations and incapacities. In writing I Was Dancing, probably his best book and one of the subtlest and most suggestive novels to come out of the Hub since The Bostonians, Edwin O'Connor, prose laureate of the Boston Irish, has done just that. What, by the way, are these limitations? Well, O'Connor cannot do women at all—the youngish wife of I Was Dancing is his usual stick figure paid off in a fine phrase ('fair-haired, fresh-faced with great grey eyes') and banished from the book within a chapter or so while the men settle to business; his grasp of Boston's peculiarly ethnocentric social and political patterns is, on the evidence of The Last Hurrah, superficial and melodramatic, especially in relation to the Yankee-Irish cleavage; and the characteristically somber atmosphere of his writing is anything but appropriate to the mode of straight comedy in which many of his admirers insist on pigeonholing practically all his writing. For example if The Last Hurrah—any of it—is 'hilarious' then the defenestration of the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear is a laff-riot. On the other hand. Skeffington's story does perfectly well as sad comedy, although I do believe that actual Boston is not and never was so dim and drear as the prevailing tone and mood of The Last Hurrah make it seem.
Review, 1156 words
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