TIME AFTER TIME

My second Molly Keane novel this year, and, thank goodness, an improvement over the first, "Devoted Ladies." It pleases me to know that Ms. Keane grew a little kinder as she grew older. ("Devoted Ladies" was written in 1934; this book in 1983.) Still, she, like her earlier compatriots, Somerville and Ross (Edith Somerville and Violet Florence Martin), presents a composite picture of the twentieth-century Anglo-Irish that is distinctly unflattering, honest though it may be. There is a cruelness to the way the aged members of the Swift family--April, May, June, and brother Jasper--hone in on each other's sore spots and rub them mercilessly. But cruelest of all is their cousin Leda, whose mother married (horrors!) "a Jew." Banished from the house years earlier as a teenager, she turns up again as an old woman, blindly (literally and figuratively) bent on revenge. Spoiler alert: Not least among the kindlier aspects of this Keane novel is its happy-turn-of-events ending.