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The Fourth Hand, by John Irving
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While reporting a story from India, New York journalist Patrick Wallingford inadvertently becomes his own headline when his left hand is eaten by a lion. In Boston, a renowned surgeon eagerly awaits the opportunity to perform the nation’s first hand transplant. But what if the donor’s widow demands visitation rights with the hand? In answering this unexpected question, John Irving has written a novel that is by turns brilliantly comic and emotionally moving, offering a penetrating look at the power of second chances and the will to change.
- Sales Rank: #802182 in Books
- Brand: Ballantine Books
- Published on: 2002-05
- Released on: 2002-05-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.16" h x .77" w x 5.42" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 316 pages
- Great product!
Amazon.com Review
Like anything newsworthy, miracles of medicine and technology inevitably make their way out of the headlines and become the stuff of fiction. In recent years readers have been absorbed by media accounts of a transplanted hand, an experiment that ultimately ended in amputation. Medical ethicists reason that a hand, unlike a heart or a liver--essential organs conveniently housed out of sight--is in full view and one of a pair, arguably dispensable. In his 10th novel, however, John Irving undertakes to imagine just such a transplant, which involves a donor, a recipient, a surgeon, a particular Green Bay Packer fan, and the remarkable left hand that brings them together.
Television reporter Patrick Wallingford becomes a story himself when he loses his hand to a caged lion while in India covering a circus. The moment is captured live on film, and Patrick (who wears a "perpetual but dismaying smile--the look of someone who knows he's met you before but can't recall the exact occasion") is henceforth known as the lion guy. Before long, plans are made to equip Patrick with a new hand. Doctor Nicholas M. Zajac, superstar surgeon, indefatigable dog-poop scooper, runner, and part-time father, is poised to perform the operation. But the donor--or rather the widow of the donor--has a few stipulations. Doris Clausen wants to meet the one-handed reporter before the procedure, and insists on visitation rights afterward. Irving weaves these characters and a panoply of others together in a smart, funny, readable narrative. Often farcical, The Fourth Hand is ultimately something more: a tender chronicle of the redemptive power of love. --Victoria Jenkins
From Publishers Weekly
A touch of the bizarre has always enlivened Irving's novels, and here he outdoes himself in spinning a grotesque incident into a dramatic story brimming with humor, sexual shenanigans and unexpected poignancy. While reporting on a trapeze artist who fell to his death in India (shades of Irving's A Son of the Circus), handsome TV anchorman Patrick Wallingford experiences a freak accident his left hand is chewed off by a lion. Wallingford's network, a low-rent pseudo-CNN, promotes the video of the accident, making Wallingford notorious world-wide as "the lion guy." Five years after the accident, Wallingford is made whole via the second hand-transplant ever. The hand comes with a strange condition, however. It belonged to Otto Clausen, who willed it to Wallingford at wife Doris's instigation, and Doris wants visiting rights. On her first meeting with Wallingford, they have sex, Wallingford recognizing Doris's voice as one he heard in a vision in India while recovering from his accident. Doris, desperate to get pregnant, has her own agenda. Soon, in a sort of reversal of Taming of the Shrew, she is teaching the normally satyric Wallingford to domesticate his libido. Irving is not aiming for a grand statement in this novel, but something closer to the lovers-chasing-lovers structure of farce. As in all good comedy, there are some fabulous villains, chief among them Wallingford's sexually Machiavellian boss, Mary, who also wants to conceive his baby. Irving's set pieces are on that high level of American gothic comedy he has made uniquely his own the scene in which Wallingford goes to bed with a gum-chewing makeup girl is particularly irresistible. Refreshingly slim in comparison with Irving's previous works, and written with a new crispness, this fast-paced novel will do more than please Irving's numerous fans it will garner him new ones. (July 10)Forecast: An arresting cover, 300,00 first printing and Irving's perennial popularity will launch this book, a BOMC main selection, onto the charts with brio.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The author's tenth novel charts events and emotions in the life of a newscaster whose fame skyrockets when his left hand is eaten by a lion on camera. When the "widow" of a transplant hand accompanies the appendage to meet the handsome amputee, the determined woman more or less coerces him into sex and conceives the child she's longed for. What follows is a mostly enjoyable trip, abundant in the quirks and themes familiar to Irving's legion of fans: scatological humor, women's rights activism, the rewarding stress of fatherhood, sports metaphors, circuses, and the chronic normality of eccentricities. Irving's worlds are ludicrous in the most appealing way and expertly sentimental at the same time, and his approachable language can be both musical and magical. But here, the promising fiction takes a sharp right turn to autopsy the real-life tragedies of the JFK Jr. and Egypt Air plane crashes Tom Wolfe-type reportage that we certainly don't look for from Irving. Perhaps more disappointing is that the protagonist is motivated primarily by shockingly unoriginal doubts about and eventual disdain for the news media's morbid coverage of world events. Irving's fiction is often moral in its own way, but the moral has never come so close to obscuring the narrative as in this book. The author's magic rules the day, but recent history plays too large a role here to make this the fiction for which he'll be remembered.
- Doug McClemont, New York
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Only fair, and definitely unbalanced
By lb136
You don't even have to check the title page when you see the plot summary: reporter for sleazy cable news operation gets his hand bitten off by a lion, and a surgeon offers his service if a donor hand is found. One is, only the widow of the donor demands visiting rights. This has to be a John Irving novel, right? And it is of course. Question 13 in those ditsy little discussion group questions that seem to be appearing at the end of every paperback novel these days asks you to ponder this: "In what way does this novel have elements of a fairy tale or fable?"
For two-thirds of the way through, the answer seems obvious: all ways. Mr. Irving has created a surrealistically marvelous, portrayal of the news media and the people who populate it (the action in the novel is set against real-life events such as a Super Bowl game the Green Bay Packers lost and the weekend John F. Kennedy Jr. died). Patrick Wallingford, the victim, known forever after to the public as "The Lion Guy," manages to sleep with nearly every woman he becomes involved with, the widow of the man whose hand Wallingford has been given seems somewhat demented, while the hand surgeon himself, unhappily divorced, seems more obsessed with doggydo than hand surgery. In short, everyone in Wallingford's world seem at least slightly dysfunctional.
But then in the last third, it all goes wobbly and sentimental, as the action moves from the Boston-New York axis to Green Bay, and the character of the widow, Doris Clausen, becomes (just when you were imagining Drew Barrymore playing her in the movie version), well, Rene Zellweger, while Wallingford--who you've been imagining as Jim Carrey--morphs into Robin Williams. The last two chapters slog on interminably. It's "love stuff" time. And sadly, as Mr. Irving's author's note at the end indicates, this was intentional. Indeed, question 14 asks you: "Would you call `The Fourth Hand' a Love Story'? Why or why not?"
Well now! As the cable news channel satirized here would no doubt trumpet, "we report, you decide."
Notes and asides: Mr. Irving gets moon phases right (unlike so many authors): a moon two or three days from full will indeed set at about 3:00 a.m.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Ahhhh, lighten up, fellow readers!
By Gretchen C
I'm apparently a lone voice crying in the wilderness on this one, but I found it a good read. No, it hasn't got some of the dimension and nuance of some of the other Irving books, but bear in mind that my favorite Irving work is "A Son of the Circus" -- for crying out loud, guys, a book doesn't have to be deep and profound to be good! Sometimes, it's enough that it just be fun.
I wasn't prepared to like Pat Wallingford, but his character got under my skin by the end of the book. He ended up a sort of endearing bumbler, vulnerable despite his apparent "made for television" slickness. He reminded me of Inspector Dhar from "Circus". Certain of the scenes in the book (dog turd lacrosse, the tryst between Patrick and Angie) were laugh-out-loud funny. And the ending was as marginally anticlimactic as most such scenes are in life. That's a great bit of restraint, to sacrifice drama for verisimilitude -- and in an Irving ending, restraint is a rare virtue indeed.
Perhaps we've become spoiled by Irving, the way he tends to spin such a great yarn while creating such unforgettable and nuanced characters as Homer Wells and Owen Meany . . . I don't think that was what this book was *for*. Vonnegut seldom bothered to develop a character beyond a strange situation and a beguiling turn of phrase! Why should it be a sin when Irving does it?
I liked it. I'll read it again.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Best Left in Other's Hand
By C. B. Pendleton
Wait a minute...is this a John Irving novel or a lame Kurt Vonnegut novel? That's the question you'll more than likely be asking yourself after reading the first few chapters of this book. Nice try John, but no one can create that type of quirky novel full of comically surreal characters and sardonically satirical story lines the way Vonnegut does. Best stick to what you know. Still, Irving's ability to captivate the reader is unwavering, and he does manage to slip back into the familiar Irving style towards the last third of the book - when the much beleaguered protagonist, Patrick Wallingford, is fully revealed to be nothing more than an incredibly submissive poltroon. In Vonnegut's hands, (or should I say hand), the premise of a transplanted body part that retains the soul of its original owner would very likely have resulted in a masterpiece. As it is, this novel ends up a curious, but not altogether disappointing, addition to the collected works of one of America's most readable raconteurs.
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