Suburban Sage

By J.D. Reed

AND MORE BY ANDY ROONEY by Andrew A. Rooney Atheneum; 242 pages; $12.95

At 6 a.m. in the diner some guy is loudly blabbing about the dog's infected ear, the faucet drip and how he was attacked by giant broccoli in a dream. These details can loosen screws. The only reaction: order coffee to go. No one should suffer the minutiae of another person's life. Unless that person happens to be Andy Rooney. In that case order eggs and sausage, sit back and laugh.

In television specials like Mr. Rooney

Goes to Dinner and regular contributions to CBS's 60 Minutes, the leprechaun with the deadpan delivery has regaled audiences with the details of his middle-class conformity. His collected TV essays, the bestselling A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney, disclosed his suspicions about designer underwear, his shock that no Mrs. Smith exists at Mrs. Smith's Pies, and his habit of saving warranties for appliances long since discarded. What accounts for the popularity of such ordinary views? Rooney thinks it is his compliance: "Rebels are a dime a dozen," he writes.

And More collects Rooney's recent loose change. This compilation of syndicated columns is refreshingly freed from its predecessor's videoese syntax and pictorial tricks. Here the humor is literate, affecting and familiar. Rooney rolls up his sleeves, hits his 1920-model Underwood, and writes about his native suburbia with the exhilaration of a button-down surrealist.

There, things go awry by going modern. Rooney is the biographer of basements, the cataloguer of dresser drawers, and memorializer of saved string. His loyalty extends in many directions: to his overstuffed, imperfect house ("I like it about fifty percent more than I did when the bank owned part of it"); to his clothes (many of his 19 socks do not match) and even to memory loss ("My favorite color is dark green, but I forget why"). Rooney has a misplaced fealty to conglomerated America as well. "If the bank doesn't know me by name," he writes, "the feeling's mutual, because I don't know my bank's name any more, either. It usually changes before I've used up all the checks."

Ranging out from such subjects as bathtubs, glue and how long one's hair would be if it were never cut, the perplexed investigator eventually reaches the White House. It must be difficult to live where you labor, Rooney muses. He distrusts those working breakfasts. "Hadn't the President already had a little something before he sat down with all those people?"

Such piquant thoughts enchant partly by astonishment: Who else would say such things in print? The burden is one that Rooney gladly accepts. "I'm telling you all these things about myself not because I think you care about my problems, but it might interest you to translate them into terms of your own." If the author's gifts for home truth and Establishment-deflation are not in the same league with H.L. Mencken's attacks on American foibles, they are comfortable and well-worn. Rooney's humor is like that pair of old loafers one could not bear to throw away: just right for puttering around the house on Sunday. --By J.D. Reed

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