MUMMIE DEAREST

STRICTLY BY THE BOOK

JAMES WOLCOTT

Irish novelist Molly Keane is a tender comic genius

With Time After Time (Knopf), the Irish novelist Molly Keane once again assumes the role of Fairy Godmother, doling out goodies with a wave of her wand, using its starfish tip to smite those she disfavors. Like her 1981 novel Good Behaviour, Time After Time is a comedy set at an Irish country estate which has fallen into crimped circumstances. Durraghglass, once a place where the fox-and-hound set could warm their wet boots by the fire in lounging comfort, is now too run down even to be considered shabbygenteel. Briars and nettles choke its borders. Rust has enfeebled the workings of its iron gates. Drips, seepage, and cutting winds have reduced its farmhouses to shacks filled with puddles and manure. But all of this unheeded muck seems almost picturesque compared with the frights that await in the Durraghglass kitchen, where whitefish mites dart across the floor and dust coats the hooks where hams once hung. Monarch of the kitchen is a tiger cat named Mister Minkles, whose bottom rests serenely on the breadboard. One by one the residents of Durraghglass drift into the kitchen, only to be knocked silly by the reek of dog and cat pee— "a dungeon for dysentery" is how one resident describes the scene. The name of the family that inhabits Durraghglass? Swift. An act of homage, perhaps, to Jonathan Swift, an Irish genius whose nostrils were steeped in all the rough aromas of want and ruination. But Molly Keane isn't out to scourge. She wields that wand with a merry hand.

Like the rustic pile they call home, the Swifts are old and beginning to topple. Life has played havoc with their senses. Jasper Swift, who tosses together odd dishes in the kitchen (even raiding the dogs' dishes for beef!) is blind in one eye, the victim of an air gun accident in his youth. Firing the air gun was his sister "Baby" June, who was aiming at a robin. Her handicap is dyslexia. Far more regal and afflicted is her older sister April, whose deafness has allowed her to tune out the world and drift through Durraghglass with idiot ease, "lone as a moon." But the most poignant member of the Swift troupe is sister May, who has a maimed hand and occupies herself with craftworks (flower arranging, et cetera), her damaged hand dancing and flitting in its tasks like a bird. "Her body might have been voluptuous if it had ever been desired. Now it was a robot, programmed and pressured on its consolation track of busy occupations." Feeding on old resentments, locked into their own routines, Jasper and his sisters are an out-of-sorts band of siblings—they clack at each other like chickens, always fussing over some trifle. Occasionally, the fussing breaks into open hostilities. When May suggests that June use a tranquilizer to put her ancient dog Tiny to sleep ("one little pill and they're off"), June snaps, "Another little word out of you... and there'll be something in your coffee and you won't know about it till you're off." (The straight-talking Baby June is the sweetest character in the book.) Yet for all the grime and annoyances at Durraghglass, life there seems to putter on rather peacefully, precisely because its characters are engrossed in their own pursuits. The partitions they've built in their lives have helped keep them from leaping at each other's throats. Selfishness has kept them safely boarded up.

Under the pseudonym "M. J. Farrell," Molly Keane wrote a batch of plays in her younger days—one of them, Spring Meeting, gave Margaret Rutherford her breakthrough in 1938—and it's with a playwright's deft, mischievous touch that she introduces a new character into Durraghglass to send those partitions crashing. Materializing on the doorstep after a long absence is cousin Leda, whose hands probe the air "as though searching again some unfulfilled embrace." Leda's hands search because both of her headlights have dimmed—she's as blind as an earthworm. As their names indicate, April, May, and June represent the springtime of life, and Leda's appearance allows them to recover and savor again that lost time. (Not for nothing is Proust cited in the novel's opening paragraphs.) Because Leda is blind, she can't register the alterations the years have worked on her cousins, and so can dwell in an eternal echo chamber of reminiscence. Installed in Mummie's bedroom, where the ghosts of violet scent roam the cupboard, Leda becomes the household's new Mummie—April and May vie for her attention, she and Jasper exchange cooking hints; only June eludes her web of nostalgia. Which proves wise, for Leda soon reveals herself to be a cruel, scheming Mummie. She's like the messengers of Harsh Truth in the plays of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, stripping the other characters of their civilized lies and defenses, and leaving them exposed to the unforgiving elements. Let the raw winds whistle through their bones! is her unvoiced cry.

Time After Time is rich in quirky, unsettling jokes, but the funniest and grandest joke of all is that Leda's revelations fail to rock the heavens. In O'Neill and Williams, the undiluted truth devastates. Blanche DuBois is led off to the bin by men in .white coats; the dreamers at Harry Hope's saloon are left flapping in the breeze. But in Time After Time the truth is at first a rude shock, then an inconvenience, then (down comes the sparkling wand) a fluke of good fortune. Jasper Swift, particularly, is so encrusted with crotchets and old habits that the indiscretions of his sisters barely make a nick. Yet he's also aware of his own lack of feeling. In one of the novel's most startling moments, Jasper learns that Baby June has taken a grievous spill from a horse:

He who, to conserve his energies, would avoid crossing the kitchen floor for a tin of mustard, now expended his tired strength in panic hurrying towards a disaster he was too old to mourn. Regret, regret, and a house companionless was all he was able to feel. Beyond regret for Baby June lay the horrid prospect of teasing May without an audience. The boredom of the prospect weighted his stumbling feet on their heron's legs. Why can't I be more of a Human Being? he asked himself.

Why can't I be more of a Human Being?—capital letters and all, it's the central question of the fiction of the anomic seventies and eighties. In Jasper's case, the answer is that the burden of being more of a Human Being would probably cause his flimsy heron legs to buckle. Pinched emotions are what allow him to keep to his narrow ways. In its sly regard for the survival tactics of the very old, Time After Time is the best novel about fear and aging since Muriel Spark's classic death fugue, Memento Mori.

Molly Keane herself is no green shoot. Nearing eighty, she recently suffered the indignity of being referred to in the TLS as a "very elderly authoress." (That "authoress" makes it a double indignity. Are we to call Emily Dickinson a poetess?) But there's certainly been no thinning out of imagination, energy, lyricism, and love of wicked fun in her recent work. She writes with a full head of carbonation. Her great gift as a novelist is that she never uses her nimble, darting skills to peck at her characters as if they were scarecrows with straw for brains. She dignifies their foibles, their handicaps; she allows them to inhabit their own realm of reverie and calm purpose. As the critic Marvin Mudrick pointed out, any writer can create a monster, but it takes a Dickens to show us what a monster is like off duty, breaking for toast and tea. The Swifts aren't foul enough to be monsters—they're really brittle eccentrics, with bits chipped off—but they would remain caricatures if Keane didn't place them in what Mudrick called a "zone of quiet." Whether it's Jasper browsing through the seed catalogues, or May fondling her collection of small china rabbits, or April reading herself to sleep with Mansfield Park, or Baby June fretting over her piglets, the novel seems to cradle its characters in a hush, sealing them off from the world and its tempests. If it weren't for the radio babbling its bad news, Durraghglass would be almost entirely deaf to outside agitations.

Perhaps the most daring thing about Time After Time is that Keane has taken the themes and motifs of Good Behaviour and trotted them out of the stable again, with new ribbons. She's risked repetition and formula, and evaded both. In Good Behaviour, the protagonist, Aroon, is a big, hearty girl who stuffs food into her mouth until her cheeks balloon. When she lies in bed waiting for her first lover, she tries to make herself appear soft and airy. "I got into bed; I spread my hands on the sheets, I arranged and rearranged myself on the pillows; a nesting swan is beautiful too." If Aroon fancies herself as a swan, Leda's very name evokes a rustling of swan feathers, and her arrival in the novel is marked by an almost spectral sighting. "On his way back to the kitchen Jasper stopped for a minute on the turn of the staircase where from the high, floor-length window he saw a swan rise through the ribbons of mist lying along the river. There is ecstasy in a swan's flying; on the neck leaning lasciviously on air, the body stretched behind the shouting wings." Not only are Aroon and Leda both chesty swans, but they play mirroring roles in Keane's duels for household dominance. Aroon turns captor in Good Behaviour, Leda is taken captive in Time After Time, and the novels end with heartless Mummies flinching in defeat. What aunts were to P. G. Wodehouse, Mummies are to Molly Keane, and you feel that as long as she writes she'll find inspired ways of polishing them off.

If I have one complaint about Time After Time, it's that its title sounds like flat-footed Proust. A swanning book deserves a swanning title, and this novel flies on proclaiming wings.