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Fine Meshwork - Dan O'brien

By Dan O'brien

Release Date: 2020-02-28

Genre: Literary Criticism

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In a 1984 interview with longtime friend Edna Oā€™Brien, 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 Oā€™Brienā€™s writing but also to the connective threads that bind her work to othersā€™, including, most illuminatingly, Rothā€™s.

Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Roth and Oā€™Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In Fine Meshwork, Dan Oā€™Brien 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 Oā€™Brien 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 Americanā€”particularly Jewish Americanā€”counterpart.

Fine Meshwork - Dan O'brien

By Dan O'brien

Release Date: 2020-02-28

Genre: Literary Criticism

(0 ratings)
Read Download
In a 1984 interview with longtime friend Edna Oā€™Brien, 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 Oā€™Brienā€™s writing but also to the connective threads that bind her work to othersā€™, including, most illuminatingly, Rothā€™s.

Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Roth and Oā€™Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In Fine Meshwork, Dan Oā€™Brien 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 Oā€™Brien 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 Americanā€”particularly Jewish Americanā€”counterpart.

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