Fine Meshwork: Philip Roth, Edna O'Brien, and Jewish-Irish Literature

Fine Meshwork:Philip Roth, Edna O'Brien, and Jewish-Irish Literature Nigel Rodenhurst (bio) Dan O' Brien. Fine Meshwork: Philip Roth, Edna O' Brien, and Jewish-Irish Literature. Syracuse University Press, 2020. pp. 312. $70. An interesting book, Dan O'Brien's comparative study between the lives and works of Philip Roth and Edna O'Brien will no doubt be valuable to other scholars—especially those more familiar with one author than the other. Dan O'Brien's personal dialogue with Edna O'Brien lends the book its originality; this correspondence, when read alongside what is known of the relationship between the two authors and the interview that Roth conducted with Edna O'Brien in 1984, adds weight and depth to the arguments in Fine Meshwork. At the outset, Fine Meshwork adumbrates the overlapping careers, the original "stormy relationship" and eventual "solidarity" between Roth and Edna O'Brien (29). This dynamic culminates in Edna O'Brien's appearance at Roth's eightieth birthday celebration, at which she is said to have "flirted" with the suggestion that she and Roth had been lovers (61). By the end of the book's introduction, the stage is set for a thorough comparison of two writers who stood up to Manichean puritan conscience, blurred the boundaries of autobiography and fiction, and were attacked by members of their own sociocultural groups for their fictional representations of those groups. This comparison, we are told, will be based not only on the links established through their correspondence, but largely through their respective novels, which also appear to "flirt" with intertextual and transnational connections. For the reader who is more familiar with Roth, this book provides some useful insight into the ways in which Roth was influenced by Irish writers and some reminders of the conditions in which twentieth century Irish writers worked, especially women. O'Brien wrote mainly in exile, while some of Roth's early work, like O'Brien's, was banned in Ireland for "its depiction of premarital sex, contraception, and blasphemy" (87). [End Page 106] The introduction provides a clear outline of the long history in both Irish and Jewish literature representing the other as a "foil" or "object of desire" (5). Dan O'Brien returns to these themes in the second chapter when he analyzes Edna O'Brien's Country Girls Trilogy (1960-1964) alongside Roth's early work Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In this section, O'Brien builds on his contention that both novelists were influenced by James Joyce, specifically the Jewish character Leopold Bloom in Ulysses (1922), and Joyce's historical contextualization of the relations between Jews and the Irish in America and Ireland. Fine Meshwork argues that, while O'Brien's marriage to the "outsider" Ernest Gébler understandably influenced her early trilogy, she in fact represents this relationship specifically—and yet more subtly—to rail against Irish censorship while simultaneously subverting the sexual restraint and restrictions of post-independence Irish monoculture. Dan O'Brien also makes the case that it is too simplistic to compare the "outsider" character Eugene only to the author's husband, as there is also a clear intertextual working of Joyce's Bloom (77). The historical background provided in Fine Meshwork may be most relevant to Roth scholars and specifically those seeking to understand his interactions with Irish characters and writers. The reader is reminded that anti-Semitism was so deeply ingrained in Irish culture that the Holocaust was not believed, that rising numbers of Jewish immigrants were seen as the "cause" of anti-Semitism, and that many Irish conflated Jews and English as swindlers and enemies (75-77). The chapter ends with a compelling argument that in her representations of Eugene, O'Brien also comments on Bernard Malamud's representations of the Irish character Duffy in A New Life (1961). The third chapter, which discusses O'Brien's Night (1972) and Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969), shows the works of the two novelists to be interacting in terms of addressing nationalism, exile, and an artistic struggle over whether to write about external issues or the self, making a fair point that both were "damned either way" as each received harsh criticism when they chose...