From Curley fo Curlylocks

BENJY (143 pp.)--Edwin O'Connor--Atlantic, Little Brown ($4).

Little Benjamin Thurlow Ballou is as sweet as a cluster of lollipops. Though he is only three years old, Benjy is the best little tot in Smiles, Pa., and he always does just what his Mummy tells him. In the morning he puts on his little pink shoes and his little pink sugarplum bathrobe all by himself, and at night he puts his cute little toys neatly away in his playbox. All this makes Benjy feel "toasty-warm all over." and he can't help snuggling up to his mother and saying, "I'm gwad you my Mummy, Mummy."

The title page warns that Edwin O'Connor--author of The Last Hurrah, that uproarious and thinly disguised novel about Boston's raffish former Mayor Curley--intends Benjy as a "ferocious fairy tale." But readers can settle back unappre-hensively and enjoy this blithe-spirited, Thurberesque fable of a little boy who is too good for his own good. Along the way, longtime Bachelor O'Connor, 39, gets in some Wylie digs at Mummy. Though the fun sometimes wears thin, Benjy is a striking display of virtuosity, proving that its author can move with literary ease from Curley to curb/locks.

The Cigar Hunt. When Mrs. Ballou isn't bear-hugging her little darling, she likes to gaze fondly at her college diploma framed upon the wall. Some people, she points out to Benjy, lack her advantages. The most conspicuous lackee is Daddy Ballou, a monosyllabic TV repairman. Daddy usually climbs into the TV set after dinner, or sometimes with his dinner, and fiddles with a few wires. Daddy and Mummy also play a game called "Cigar Hunt," which Mummy generally wins with the magic words. "All right . . . hand it over!" For Mummy's sake Benjy is anxious to straighten out poor Daddy. Speaking in the third person, as he sometimes does, Benjy promises that when he goes to school, "he's going to study hard, hard ... so he'll get two diplomas. Then he can give one to Daddy."

When the great day comes for Benjy to go to school. Mummy is so thrilled that she puts on her college cap and gown and skips along the sidewalk with Benjy, singing her college song. To his "School Mummy," as he calls his teacher. Benjy is unbearably good, too. He pledges allegiance to the flag twice, and he tells teacher things she might not otherwise know--like which kid did the whispering.

The Big, Black Egg. Naturaly this does not endear little Benjy to the dirty-fingernail set in the schoolyard, but Benjy has his reward when his Good Fairy shows up. An offbeat sort decked in a baseball uniform and chomping an outsize cigar, this Good Fairy grants Benjy's only wish that "whatever big and marvelous things happen to little Benjy . . . will happen to his dear Mummy, too!" Months pass, and nothing happens until one day Mummy and Benjy drag sulky old Daddy out on a picnic. Benjy spots a giant black egg. and Daddy tells him not to fool around with it, but Mummy mutters in her through-closed-teeth voice: "Don't try to make a craven out of my son!"

Suddenly out of nowhere whooshes a great, red-eyed, scimitar-beaked bird. How the great bird proves to Benjy and Mummy that big, black eggs are strictly for the birds is a secret that readers will savor when they get to it. One hint: that night, sitting in front of the TV set for a change, with a cool glass of beer in one hand and a big cigar in the other. Daddy Ballou wears the widest grin in Smiles, Pa.

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