The Talk of the Boston Irish : WONDERFUL YEARS, WONDERFUL YEARS <i> by George V. Higgins (Henry Holt: $19.95; 261 pp.) </i>

There is a point in the musical “My Fair Lady” when its heroine, Eliza Doolittle, uses up her tolerance for the ceaseless prattle emanating from the men in her life. She unleashes a tuneful harangue to the effect that talk seems to be all that the blighters can do. Eliza might aim the same criticism at the characters in George V. Higgins’ novels. Their saving grace, however, is that, unlike so many of the things that occupy their time, their verbosity is no crime. Quite the contrary. Being in the main Boston-Irish, the folks who have very nearly elevated small talk to high art, their discourse is so smartly delivered, self-revealing and spellbinding that it really doesn’t matter that there is so little action to back it up.

Ever since 1972 and his debut novel, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” Higgins has used the same formula: Let dialogue carry the book and don’t worry about a unified plot. This has worked quite well for him in the past, in yarns about the lawyers and crooks and combinations thereof who ply their trades in Boston town. And it is just as effective in his new tale that is not really a crime story at all.

It is, instead, a parable on the human condition. Its protagonist is a nice guy named Bucky Arbuckle whose short but impressive list of bad breaks seemed to have come to an end with his tranquil, long-term employment as chauffeur to a generous contractor. Unfortunately, things are not quite as rosy for the builder, thanks to a schizophrenic wife who is sinking deeper and deeper into her troubled fantasy world; a slightly dishonest campaign contribution made a few years back, and a group of hard-charging federal prosecutors who want to use the builder to put the blocks to the recipient of the contribution.

Bucky is only vaguely aware of his boss’s legal problems. Then, fate places a troublesome drunk in his path and the ensuing unavoidable incident delivers him into the clutches of the prosecutors.

Higgins plays out his largely unpredictable yarn in conversational set-pieces. It’s as if he were sitting at the controls of an audio switchboard, turning on Bucky’s lapel mike to find him on a double-date with a couple he can’t stand, then switching to a room in which the three prosecutors discuss their political dreams and aspirations, then moving on to an old hotel in the Berkshires where the contractor’s addled wife is driving her psychiatrist round the bend and, finally, picking up the contractor and his lawyer discussing his chances of beating the rap. All of the conversations are brilliantly authentic (due, one assumes, to the author’s years as both federal prosecutor and partner in a Boston firm). Through them, Higgins makes even his most peripheral characters fully dimensional. We may not know their precise physical appearance--he’s short on those sort of details. Nor are we provided with much by way of back story. But their fine, free talk tells us everything we need to know about their present situation. All of them are trapped by one circumstance or another, and all yearn to be rid of the complications plaguing their lives.

By the end of this darkly humorous novel, they have gone through changes and have, in just about every instance, found the freedom they sought. Still, this doesn’t make for a happy ending, exactly. One major character dies. The AIDS virus is active in four others. As a seasoned cop explains the way the world works to a young lawman near the novel’s end, “Everybody gets just about what they want. It’s just, they don’t recognize it, they get it. It doesn’t look the same as what they had in mind.” For Higgins’ people, happiness carries a hefty price tag.