SOURCE: Cowley, Jason. “Incest and Holiness.” New Statesman 126, no. 4335 (23 May 1997): 49.

In the following review of Impossible Saints, Cowley asserts that Roberts's fictions are overly taken with fanciful flights of the imagination and fail to address the real experience of modern life.

Michèle Roberts is a disarmingly sensuous writer. Her sentences have a voluptuous torpor. She luxuriates in abundance. We read her for her language, for her ornate style and disturbed Gothic imagination. Themes and motifs recur: the relationship of mothers and daughters, the allure of incest, the oppressiveness of Catholicism, the seductive pleasure of food, the mystery of enclosed, contemplative orders. Her books, though repetitive and melodramatic, are hard to forget.

In a recent interview Roberts said Impossible Saints was her final attempt “to exorcise” what Catholicism had done to her as a child. Roberts, one feels, would agree with Kirkegaard that “the closer you keep to...