SOURCE: Birch, Helen. “Whispers of Immortality.” New Statesman and Society 3, no. 94 (30 March 1990): 40.

In the following review, Birch describes In the Red Kitchen as an exploration of the feminine unconscious using the narratives of the four central characters.

Michèle Roberts is an exquisite writer. For her, language is a precious instrument with which she traces the contours of the world, mixing its colours, identifying tone and shade and smell, as if failure to classify would cause it to crumble. Her meticulous realism invites comparisons with that much-maligned genre, the “women's novel” of the thirties, forties and fifties, when miniaturists like Barbara Comyns, Rosamund Lehmann and Elizabeth Taylor attuned their sensibilities to every frisson, every nuance and left the Big Picture to the boys.

Roberts's choice of themes—an enduring fascination with the arcane symbols of faith (specifically Catholicism) and attempts to relocate ancient myths through the lives of...