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by Molly Keane
A wickedly funny satire of Irish society after WWI, featuring "delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them" (Vulture).
Is it possible to kill with kindness? As Molly Keane's Booker Prize–short-listed dark comedy suggests, not only can kindness be deadly, it just may be the best form of revenge. The novel opens as Aroon St. Charles prepares to serve her invalid mother a splendid luncheon—the silver gleams, the linens glow—of rabbit mousse, a dish her mother despises. In fact, a single whiff of the stuff is enough to knock the old lady dead. "All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives," says Aroon soon after. In the pages that follow she will make her case, reminiscing about her youth among the hunting-and-fishing classes of Ireland, a faded aristocracy dedicated to distraction even as their fortunes dwindle.
Keane's brilliant sleight of hand is to allow her blinkered heroine to narrate her own development from neglected child, to ungainly debutante, to bitter spinster: Aroon understands nothing, yet she reveals all.
"Molly Keane's Good Behaviour presents a character whose own strict Christian code wreaks havoc on all those around her. Though she herself tells the tale, we somehow see her morality's disastrous consequences. Hilarious and sinister." —The New York Times
"Simultaneously light and dark, pleasurable and harrowing, Good Behaviour may appeal chiefly to readers drawn to characters who are a mixture of well-meaning and hilariously vile, victimizer and victim... . Aroon St. Charles is Molly Keane's great creation, Good Behaviour her masterpiece." —The New York Review of Books
"Dark, complex, engaging ... a wonderful tour de force." —Marian Keyes, author of Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married
"I have read and re-read Molly Keane more, I think, than any other writer. Nobody else can touch her as a satirist, tragedian, and dissector of human behaviour. I love all her books, but Good Behaviour and Loving and Giving are the ones I return to most." —Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet
This information about Good Behaviour (New York Review Books Classics) was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Molly Keane (1904–1996) was a novelist and playwright born in Kildare, Ireland, to a wealthy hunting family. As a teenager, she started writing in secret, composing fiction that satirized the idiosyncrasies of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. She published eleven novels under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell, first publishing under her own name in 1981, at the age of seventy-seven, with Good Behaviour.
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