[In the following excerpt, Ross praises O'Faolain's Godded and Codded.]

A dotty Irishman, holed up in the jungles of Paris, is one of the chief characters in Julia O'Faolain's first novel Godded and Codded…. [T]his is an immensely stylish and richly allusive performance…. Though not exactly original in its account of the wayward affair between a sexy Irish student from the bogs and a wily, Arab revolutionary, Godded and Codded has so many incidental pleasures that its fairly routine plot about sexual awakening scarcely matters. In a beautifully suggested Paris of cold lodgings, hot passions, trees, restaurants, abortion wards and tutelary roués, among whom the Irish innocents flounder in a haze of romantic longing and booze, enough comes through about living, learning and loving for the odd confusions and self-indulgences to seem irrelevant. Julia O'Faolain has all the essential gifts—a sense of high comedy, fastidiousness of language and of feeling, intellectual control over widely-ranging scraps of knowledge—and she uses them with the lightest of touches.