Problems and difficult subjects are hinted at, never addressed directly. Mentioning money or sex is in the worst of taste. When someone dies, grief is kept under wraps. Good behavior is refusing to express strong emotions, never talking about certain subjects. Her problem is “good behaviour.”įor Aroon’s upper-class family-her father, mother, and brother Hubert-good behavior isn’t about what you do, only what you say. Aroon is at a loss to understand herself, but everything she’s oblivious to is clear enough to the reader. You’ll have gathered Aroon isn’t the most sympathetic narrator. “I have lived for the people dearest to me,” Aroon tells us, “and I am at a loss to know why their lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy.” The rest of the novel jumps back to Aroon’s childhood and young adulthood in a country house called Temple Alice, as she unsuccessfully struggles to understand how she ended up sour, and unlikable, and alone. Aroon tells Rose, the housekeeper, to call the doctor and save the mousse for lunch. Her mother hates rabbit even more than she hates Aroon and keels over dead from, I guess, just the mousse’s powerful bunny emanations. The novel opens as Aroon serves her bedridden mother a rabbit mousse. Charles, who by the end of the first chapter will be the last surviving member of an aristocratic Irish family in reduced circumstances. I get vicariously embarrassed reading about embarrassment, and in places I had to put the book down for a while.

Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour is one of those, inasmuch as it’s drawing room cringe comedy. Even books I wouldn’t otherwise have picked up are often winners. They’re my favorite publisher there’s this uncanny correspondence between their editorial policies and my personal taste. I review a lot of New York Review Books Classics books on this site because I read a lot of them.

Good behaviour by molly keane