Good Behaviour

Molly Keane

May 2021 · New York Review of Books

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Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

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).

“Hilarious and sinister.” —The New York Times

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.

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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. 

Amy Gentry is the author of Good as Gone, a New York Times Notable Book, and Last Woman Standing. She is also a nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in numerous outlets, including the Chicago Tribune, Salon, and The Paris Review. She lives in Austin, Texas.