It is a violent book in spite of the slavish devotion to good breeding that forbids all its characters, including narrator Aroon, from acknowledging troubles of any kind. "Good Behaviour" is nearly flawless, its satire a blade sharpened almost to transparency.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1981, it lost to Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" - a more ambitious novel, but not a better one. Two decades passed before Keane's friend Peggy Ashcroft found "Good Behaviour" in a drawer and convinced her to publish it. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, she financed her horse-and-hound lifestyle with novels one Kirkus reviewer characterized as "brilliant, witty, luxuriously malicious" later she became a successful playwright, her comedies directed by John Gielgud for the London stage.Īfter the death of her husband in 1945 left Keane to raise two daughters alone, her output slowed and eventually stopped altogether. Farrell- because being a novelist wasn't considered good behavior, either. A daughter of the fading Anglo-Irish gentry, she took up writing at age 17 while sick in bed and published her first novel under the pseudonym M. Keane, like Comyns and many other British women writers of her generation, enjoyed a long but utterly nontraditional literary career. Reasons to re-read Irish writer Molly Keane are never lacking despite the difficulty of getting her books stateside, but the American indie-press revival of Barbara Comyns has, for me, brought Keane vividly back to mind. Charles, the towering, bosomy anti-heroine of Molly Keane's 1981 novel "Good Behaviour" - or it would be, if cries of any sort were considered good behavior in Aroon's world.
I have lived for the people dearest to me, and I am at a loss to know why their lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy." This is the cri de coeur of Aroon St. "All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives.
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