In a 1984 interview with longtime friend Edna OBrien, Philip Roth describes her writing as a piece of fine meshwork, a net of perfectly observed sensuous details that enables you to contain all the longing and pain and remorse that surge through the fiction. The phrase fine meshwork can apply not only to OBriens writing but also to the connective threads that bind her work to others, including, most illuminatingly, Roths. Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Roth and OBrien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In Fine Meshwork, Dan OBrien investigates the shared concerns of these two authors, now regarded as literary icons in their home countries. He traces their fifty-year literary friendship and the striking parallels in their books and reception, bringing together what, at first glance, seem to be quite disparate milieus: the largely feminist and Irish scholarship on OBrien with Jewish and American perspectives on Roth. In doing so, and in considering them in a transnational context, he argues that the intertwined nature of their writing symbolizes the far-ranging symbiosis between Irish literature and its Americanparticularly Jewish Americancounterpart.
- | Author: Dan O'Brien
- | Publisher: Syracuse University Press
- | Publication Date: February 28, 2020
- | Number of Pages: 288 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Paperback
- | ISBN-10: 0815636393
- | ISBN-13: 9780815636397