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The Paris Review - The Horror of 'Good Behaviour'


Molly Keane. Photo: © D. Donahue.
“All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives,” says Aroon St. Charles, the tall, bosomy antiheroine of Molly Keane’s
Good Behaviour, minutes after killing her mother
. “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.”
As a narrator, Aroon is a monster of repression, revealing things she herself does not know on every page. Take this first scene, in which she—well,
murder is such an ugly word. 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. 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 r ....

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