Good Behaviour
by Molly Keane
NYRB Classics, 2021

When Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour was first published in 1981, the author was 76. Decades earlier, as “M.J. Farrell,” she had written a number of well-received novels—“horsey, housey romances” one critic called them—that drew upon her post-WWI life in County Kildare, Ireland, the daughter of a whose passion for dogs and horses left little time for parenting, and of a mother who made a name—though she too used a nom de plume—as a minor regional poet. Keane began writing as a means of making extra money and chose her pseudonym (from a random pub sign) to avoid the approbation of her peers: Women were discouraged from reading books, much less writing them.

The Keane family were Anglo-Irish, Protestants among Catholics, whose ongoing political conflicts boiled over in the War of Irish Independence during Keane’s childhood. (Her father, an Englishman, stubbornly resisted those who urged him to move his family to his homeland to avoid the violence.)

The diminishing power, wealth, and influence of the Anglo-Irish suffuses Keane’s novels, and often served as a backdrop to lives largely spent avoiding hard truths; riding, hunting, fishing, and partying in defiance of their impending doom was the norm. It was the era of the “Big House,” the grand manors of the landed gentry owned by Protestant families and serviced by the Catholic “underclass.”  But tables turned during the Irish uprising; Keane’s family manse, Ballyrankin, built in the 18th century, was burned to the ground by armed rebels while she was in boarding school.  (Keane’s friend and contemporary Elizabeth Bowen often drew successfully from this fertile ground for her own work.)                                                                        

Between 1926 and 1952, Keane wrote 11 novels, as well as a number of successful plays. Her career led to collaborations and lasting friendships with John Gielgud and a trio of redoubtable Dames: Margaret Rutherford, Sybil Thorndyke, and Peggy Ashcroft. But the unexpected death of her beloved husband Bobby Keane in 1946 all but drowned her urge to create.

There was a near 30-year gap between her last novel as M.J. Farrell and Good Behaviour, which one publisher deemed too “nasty,” and urged her to make it less so. She refused, put it away, and only submitted it again at the urging of Dame Peggy. (It was fortunate at this juncture that it came to the attention of the legendary editor Diana Athill, who became its fierce champion.) The book—the first to boast her real name— prompted ecstatic reviews (Hilary Mantel later expressed the wish that she herself had written it), and was shortlisted for the Booker. (It lost to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.) Two more novels followed until Keane’s death in 1996 at the age of 92.  NYRB’s edition, with an excellent introduction by Amy Gentry, is the first U.S. publication since 1981.

And a welcome return it is. At the center of Good Behaviour is Aroon St. Charles, 57 at the book’s start (in a scene that is one of most audacious openings I can recall), who narrates her life story with a singular lack of sentiment but a great deal of self-delusion, a trait that makes her alternately exasperating, sympathetic, hateful and endearing. Aroon is almost entirely devoid of insight and self-reflection, and so frustratingly dim that we forgive her only because most of those who surround her are, living in a Big House known as Temple Alice, worse. That includes a repellent mother, a failed painter who hates children and dogs and lets the family devolve into penury; a father with more passion for outdoorsy things than the task of supporting of the family (and who helps himself at will to the flesh of myriad women, servants included); and a brother, Hubert, handsome and dissolute, who exploits Aroon’s most tender vulnerabilities to hide his homosexuality.

Hubert calls her “Pig-wig,” a nickname more derisive than affectionate, because Aroon is a large woman— tall, overweight, with “enormous breasts,” a fact of life that perpetually brings shame and self-consciousness. Her mother is particularly venomous: “Fat people are not supposed to feel the cold,” she tells Aroon as an explanation for reducing the number of active fireplaces in the house. And, “Don’t let’s talk about your size  . . . They say that whales can live for months on their own fat—do they call it blubber?” Little surprise then when Aroon offers this poignant revelation: “Only when alone could I feel a small, cherished person.”

While it may appear that there is little to like or admire among the book’s characters—including Richard, Hubert’s intimate friend, with whom Aroon falls hopelessly and eternally in love, against all odds—Keane supplies a cast of supporting players who give us hope for humanity. Take Rose, the redoubtable housemaid-turned-cook-turned nurse, who tirelessly cared for Aroon’s father, bedridden (minus one leg) and virtually helpless after a stroke, and who was not above giving him a bit of sexual relief under the blankets. She has enough generosity and humanity to ward off the icy breezes generated by most every other character.

In her tender but unsentimental memoir (Molly Keane: A Life), Keane’s daughter, Sally Phipps, reports that her mother discouraged some friends from reading the book, certain that they’d hate it. (And they did, she writes.) But those who chose to ignore it altogether did so at their peril, missing a minor classic as touching as it is darkly comic. Keane’s writing is lapidary and sensual. And achingly human. Here is Aroon dressing for a rare social event, trying on a new frock for her father’s approval:

Excitement possessed me. I was dressing for somebody. As I strapped down my bosoms, I was outside my body and dressing it up with extreme care and calculation. At last I was ready for my dress. I struggled in. I looked at unbelievable me. Gold and pink swooned round, melting my size away. I stepped up to my reflection, then away from it, and I could find only surprise and delight in what I saw.  Holding the rose here and there against my shoulder, I waited for a shudder of pleasure to run through me before I plunged the point of the safety-pin into the dress and shoulder straps . . . Papa must see me as I really am, every wave rigidly in place, flawless. I was hungry for his approval as for a good dinner.

Certain extended scenes are unforgettable, as when Richard, Aroon’s fantasy lover—but in fact her brother’s preferred bedmate—spends the night in her room to deflect attention from the men’s true relationship. (Spoiler: nothing happens.) We nearly weep benighted Aroon, despite her inarguable flaws.

Language sings on almost every page: “the scrawny beauty of our house”; “a miasma of unspoken criticism and disparagement”; “a voice humid with kindness”; concerning a house built on a sea cliff: “its windows lean out of the boat cove like bosoms on an old ship’s figurehead.”

Widely considered her masterpiece (although Athill gave that distinction to her final book, Loving and Giving, aka Queen Lear in the U.S.), Good Behaviour and its reissue should by all rights give Keane a renaissance of the kind enjoyed by Barbara Pym. Wicked humor and deeply felt characters are the hallmarks of both women—as are their respective claims to be among 20th-century literature’s minor novelists most worthy of permanent attention.

Michael Adams is a writer and editor living in New York City. He holds a PhD from Northwestern University in Performance Studies.