Good Behaviour

Families. What would we do without them? Molly Keane strips a family down to its bare essentials in this fabulous novel.

It's fabulous because Good Behaviour has something of the best fairy tales about it, a magical quality in the setting and the life described. It also, and this is why I loved the book so much, has a fantastically awful mother.

I was lucky; I had a wonderful mother, and yet I’m paradoxically drawn to depictions of her opposite. I love reading about terrible mothers and frequently introduce them into my own work.

Aroon, the galumphing, unloved, and unreliable… show more.

Coming across the New York Review Books reissue of this neglected 1981 novel was one of the reading highlights of the past year, like finding a hundred-dollar bill tucked into a pair of old jeans.

It’s a cruelly funny, acerbic look back at high-toned, gin-soaked, Anglo-Irish country life of half a century before, as reconstructed by the most self-deluded narrator you’ll ever encounter. Keane is marvelous at getting at the savagery beneath the good manners of polite society; this is a drawing-room satire with teeth.

Set among the dilapidated Anglo-Irish gentry in rural Ireland as they sink slowly into decline, what makes this book strange and unique among country house novels is the way it deals with its narrator. The daughter of a landowner in a big run-down house, in a social world dominated by horses and hunting, she sees what’s going on around her but fails to understand it, hemmed in by rules of behaviour that make many things simply impossible to name. We see that her brother is gay, for instance, but she never spots it, even when she walks in on her… show more.