Good behavior requires lying, and the more Aroon lies to herself, the more she is lied to by others, often with sociopathic callousness. Brock’s fate acquires a mythic significance, a prime example of bad behavior brutally punished.Īroon’s desperation to avoid that fate leads her from cringe comedy to what I can only call cringe tragedy. After all, she must know enough to know what she must not let herself know. Layering Aroon’s past and present points of view with those of characters who haven’t yet been introduced, Keane masterfully reveals the coexistence in Aroon of deep, instinctual knowledge and willful ignorance. The most notable of these is a long digression about Aroon’s plump, sentimental governess, Mrs. To solve the whydunit of Good Behaviour, the reader must penetrate its narrator’s protective shell of denial, divining the truth through odd silences and peculiar lapses in the narrative point of view. Starved for affection from her philandering father and chilly, distant mother (“She had had us and she longed to forget the horror of it once and for all”), she yearns to be “a small cherished person” but is referred to instead as “massive.” Deprived of food, comfort, and love, instead of shrinking, she grows. Grief, in particular, is forbidden.Īroon is cursed from the start with an ordinary need for love and a body out of sync with the 1920s fetish for slim, boyish figures. Bodies and their functions are taboo, as are excessive feelings of any kind. It is a world of horses and hounds and endless gin cocktails, actively hostile to the inner life a world where a child caught reading a book is admonished and sent back outside. To answer that question, Keane takes us back to Aroon’s origins in Temple Alice, the Anglo-Irish “big house” where she was born. When, afterward, she orders the housekeeper to save the leftovers for lunch-mustn’t waste!-we know, even if she doesn’t, that this act of symbolic cannibalism is meant to perfect her revenge. Let’s just say the book opens with Aroon speeding her invalid mother’s twilight years to their inevitable conclusion with the aid of an indigestible rabbit mousse. Take this first scene, in which she-well, murder is such an ugly word. “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.”Īs a narrator, Aroon is a monster of repression, revealing things she herself does not know on every page.

Charles, the tall, bosomy antiheroine of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, minutes after killing her mother. “All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives,” says Aroon St.

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