Fine Meshwork: Philip Roth, Edna O'Brien, and Jewish-Irish LiteratureIn a 1984 interview with longtime friend Edna O'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 O'Brien's writing but also to the connective threads that bind her work to others', including, most illuminatingly, Roth's. Since the publication of