Time After Time is an interesting and funny tale full of grim, accurate observations, but to me it does not possess the stylish, classical form of [Good Behaviour] … nor has it that masterpiece's almost Lillian Hellman-like inevitability. Furthermore, instead of tracing a single heroine's decline from innocence to obese self-indulgence, it scatters our attention among five characters almost equally detestable from the start.

As ever in Keane's world, we find ourselves hobnobbing with the gentry in southern Ireland. The action and inaction take place mainly in a dilapidated house where once three sisters and a brother lived with their parents in heedless opulence. The narrative swims backward and forward from the wounding memories of a mysteriously troubled past to the petty anticlimaxes of the present.

By the time we meet these exiles from happiness, the Swifts are all disfigured in one way or another. The old man has...