The Fourth Hand (Hardcover)

by John Irving (Author) "IMAGINE A YOUNG MAN on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event-the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age..." (more)
Key Phrases: newsroom women, boathouse apartment, lion guy, Patrick Wallingford, New York, Green Bay (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (July 3, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375506276
• ISBN-13: 978-0375506277
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (278 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #746,608 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Missing something..., July 10, 2001

By	C. Fletcher (California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

John Irving is a brilliant writer, but "The Fourth Hand" is less than a brilliant book. It's immensely readable, that's for sure--it's hard not to fly through this book, even if you're an incredibly slow reader, like I am. But by the time you've sprinted to the end of its 313 pages--making it Irving's second shortest novel after "The Water-Method Man"--you're left with the twitching-phantom-limb feeling that "The Fourth Hand" is missing something important.

But what is it missing? Most of the characters are sufficiently unique and interestingly colorful to satisfy any long-time John Irving reader. I loved the subplot with the hand surgeon, Zajac, his son, and his housekeeper. The writing, as usual, is top-notch. (I must say, however, I was a little disappointed with the first sentence. Usually Irving knocks you right off your feet with his first sentences. This one barely made me shuffle my feet.)

What "The Fourth Hand" lacks that Irving's best novels nearly drown you in is a sense of emotional immensity. It doesn't help matters that this is such a short book. I think Irving is at his best in the form of the sprawling novel, where his themes and characters have ample time and space to weave themselves together on the loom of your imagination.

"The Fourth Hand" suffers from excessive lightness. It might be thought of as the 158-Pound Novel. There's a heaviness--a pleasant heaviness--to books like "The World According to Garp," "A Prayer for Owen Meany," and "A Widow For One Year" that simply isn't here.

And the plot just isn't as satisfying as that of "The Hotel New Hampshire" or "The Cider House Rules". After a solid beginning--the first sentence notwithstanding--this novel just meanders. You are still compelled to know what happens next (Irving's main strengths as a storyteller never really flag) but you find yourself just not caring which way things turn out.

Part of the problem I believe is the downright bizarreness of the central love story. The main character, Patrick Wallingford, is a sort of empty soul, who begins, with the progression of events in the story, to fill himself up. The stuff he fills himself with, though, seems so arbitrary and weird.

That he falls in love with the not-necessarily-likable Mrs. Clausen, the widow of the donor of his new left hand, is a plot point that is just given to us, rather than built up to. Mrs. Clausen isn't exactly unlikable, but she's just too emotionally obscure to create much sympathy in the reader. The gum-smacking Brooklyn makeup-girl that Wallingford tarries with briefly is much more likable than Mrs. Clausen herself. But maybe that's just the way the hand of fate is dealt, and we don't have much of a choice who we fall in love with.

Either way, at the end of this novel, I felt I hadn't gotten the full Irving treatment that I had come to expect. There are moments of greatness along the way, and any longtime Irving fan should certainly read this novel, but it's just not one of his best.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not one of Irving's best efforts, July 31, 2001

By	Douglas A. Greenberg (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

John Irving's novels are always worth reading, and *The Fourth Hand* is no exception. Certainly, it's a fun summertime read that moves right along and is seldom (though I can't say never)boring. As always, Irving creates some memorable and bizarre body-related imagery and a few weirdly endearing characters, such as the gum-chewing makeup girl, Angie. The famous Irving dry wit manifests itself frequently, and there is enough worthwhile social commentary related to the predatory nature of the media and the overall foibles of human nature to render this book "ok."

But compared with *The Cider House Rules* *A Son of the Circus* (an underrated jewel of a novel), *A Widow For One Year*, and even *The World According to Garp*, this book seems a pallid effort, indeed. The overall premise/metaphor related to the loss of the protagonist's left hand seems labored and at times even silly; the characters on the whole seem wooden, unlikeable, and even worse, unmemorable; and the slightly sappy ending is all too predictable and Hollywood-esque. I would add that Irving's main character, the handsome newscaster Patrick Wallingford, seems oddly bland for a guy who supposedly is irresistable to all women. In fact, Patrick's seemingly effortless success at bedding any and all females seems to represent a male fantasy of sexual omniscience, the flip side of which is Irving's unflattering portrayal of just about all of his female characters as conniving and manipulative. It's hard for me to reconcile Irving's strangely flat and unappealing lead characters with the supposed ultimate message regarding how love abides and conquers all.

This is certainly not a terrible novel. In fact, I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to anyone looking for an engrossing few hundred pages to while away a few lazy summertime hours. I suppose that like so many other people, however, I have come to expect a lof a significant writer like John Irving, and this work proved disappointingly lightweight.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Irving Provides both a Hoot and a Ponder, July 7, 2001

By	Timothy T. Cheeseman (Ohio USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Irving's newest selection is a welcome return to familiar territory for his devoted readers. The novel The Fourth Hand reveals sympathetic and intriguing characters through bizarre incidents treated as the mundane. As is expected by his readers, the characters are idiosyncratic and muted, but infinitely likable and pitiable during their travails through Irving's surreal but grounded landscape, which is mostly urban and American in this novel. While he does not reign in his affinity for the uncanny and coincidental, Irving does seem to offer some restraint with his imagery and symbolism that have been critiqued in prior work as " heavy-handed". This novel is above all, a narrative. But the only major flaw is tethered to that same restraint. The writing sparingly uses dialogue and reads like a story told perhaps over a long drunken weekend, or one an eccentric uncle might be adept at spinning after far too many years of practice. The author even drops the veil a few times early in the novel with phrases such as " don't forget " and " don't think". This is troubling but not entirely damaging. Irving's expertise at subtle farce ( particularly sexual ) and especially crisp description is preserved as when he describes a female character as " pretty in a kind of bereft or disturbed way, as if there'd recently been a suicide or a murder of someone close to her..." The novel certainly demonstrates an author more in tune with reflection and redemption. The tone and overall passion of the work is more gentle, but still charged and compelling. This may simply reflect the Irving on the jacket that now appears scholarly and grandfatherly ( no doubt gazing at his Oscar ) rather than the iron jawed ex-wrestler on his early books. For fans, and I am one, it is a joy. For anyone, it is a crafted and original tale that explores archetypal yearnings and questions, albeit in Irving's own slightly twisted universe. I read it quickly and needed to know how it would end. And that is likely the finest endorsement.