As the world watches, handsome TV journalist Patrick Wallingford, who is obsessed with minutely described one-night stands, has his hand eaten by a lion at the Gnesh Circus. (The gnesh is an Indian symbol of new beginnings). Viewer Doris and her husband Otto are obsessed with the Green Bay Packers and with having a child. Doris cajoles Otto into willing his left hand to Patrick and surprise! Otto soon (accidentally?) kills himself. Famous hand surgeon Nicholas Zajak is, for his part, obsessed with dog feces also described in endless detail which he scoops up with his old lacrosse stick and hurls at rowers on the Charles River. Zajak attaches Otto's hand to Patrick, and Doris demands visitation rights with Otto's hand, as well as with Patrick's child-producing equipment. Though their motivations remain unclear, all three characters are redeemed by their newfound obsessions with winning the love of their sons. Culp's clear, pleasant, middle-range reading voice, appropriately ironic tone and fun, exaggerated Boston accents are easy on the ears. Simultaneous release with Random House hardcover (Forecasts, June 25).

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Irving is compulsively readable in spite of his pedestrian social commentary and his bossy habit of telling the reader what his characters are all about rather than letting them reveal their inner selves. His hapless hero, the overly handsome Patrick Wallingford, a New York television reporter for an all-news station specializing in bizarre disasters, beds any woman who flirts with him and doesn't care if his wife knows or not. Such fecklessness begs for retribution, and Patrick's is as surreal as it is brutal. Irving revisits the setting he so enjoyed in A Son of the Circus (1994) by sending Patrick to India to cover a story about a trapeze artist whose husband died trying to catch her as she plunged to the earth, the first and most literal of a series of man-crushing females. A woman even causes the confusion that results in Patrick losing his left hand to a cageful of hungry circus lions. Much subdued, he decides to get a hand transplant. Enter a very peculiar surgeon named Sajac, who is obsessed with dog poop, his son, and E. B. White's children's books, Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web. These become the guiding texts for Patrick's slow acquisition of a soul, a process stimulated by a Green Bay Packers fanatic, Doris Clausen, who offers a deal: she'll give Patrick her dead husband's left hand if he'll give her a baby. This is classic Irving: extreme medical procedures, missing body parts, and a surfeit of sex. But his condemnation of the media for such excesses as the shameless orgy over the death of JFK Jr. is right-on, and for all its machismo and conflicted feelings about women, this is one crazy but sweet little love story. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

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. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

John Irving published his first novel at the age of twenty-six. He has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation; he has won an O. Henry Award, a National Book Award, and an Oscar.

In 1992, Mr. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In January 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Die-hard fans of John Irving, especially those who share his taste for the grotesque and for irony as broad as a barn, may find much to like in this fable about a shallow, passive newscaster named Patrick Wallingford who covers disasters and then becomes one himself when a lion bites his hand off. Wallingford is alleged to be irresistible to women; a young widow in Wisconsin is alleged to want Wallingford to father a baby upon her and then receive her husband's transplanted hand, to which she will then expect visitation rights. If Irving ever aspired to subtlety or true comedy he no longer does, but this is vintage Irving, and at least the performance by Jason Culp is unusually appealing, except for his unfortunate way with a Boston accent. B.G. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The Fourth Hand asks an interesting question: ?How can anyone identify a dream of the future?? The answer: ?Destiny is not imaginable, except in dreams or to those in love."

While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation?s first hand transplant; meanwhile, in the distracting aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, the surgeon is seduced by his housekeeper. A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the one-handed reporter her husband?s left hand? that is, after her husband dies. But the husband is alive, relatively young, and healthy.

This is how John Irving?s tenth novel begins; it seems, at first, to be a comedy, perhaps a satire, almost certainly a sexual farce. Yet, in the end, The Fourth Hand is as realistic and emotionally moving as any of Mr. Irving?s previous novels ? including The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year ? or his Oscar-winning screenplay of The Cider House Rules.

The Fourth Hand is characteristic of John Irving?s seamless storytelling and further explores some of the author?s recurring themes ? loss, grief, love as redemption. But this novel also breaks new ground; it offers a penetrating look at the power of second chances and the will to change.


From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Chapter one

The Lion Guy

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.

As a schoolboy, he was a promising student, a fair-minded and likable kid, without being terribly original. Those classmates who could remember the future hand recipient from his elementary-school days would never have described him as daring. Later, in high school, his success with girls notwithstanding, he was rarely a bold boy, certainly not a reckless one. While he was irrefutably good-looking, what his former girlfriends would recall as most appealing about him was that he deferred to them.

Throughout college, no one would have predicted that fame was his destiny. “He was so unchallenging,” an ex-girlfriend said.

Another young woman, who’d known him briefly in graduate school, agreed. “He didn’t have the confidence of someone who was going to do anything special” was how she put it.

He wore a perpetual but dismaying smile—the look of someone who knows he’s met you before but can’t recall the exact occasion. He might have been in the act of guessing whether the previous meeting was at a funeral or in a brothel, which would explain why, in his smile, there was an unsettling combination of grief and embarrassment.

He’d had an affair with his thesis adviser; she was either a reflection of or a reason for his lack of direction as a graduate student. Later—she was a divorcée with a nearly grown daughter—she would assert: “You could never rely on someone that good-looking. He was also a classic underachiever—he wasn’t as hopeless as you first thought. You wanted to help him. You wanted to change him. You definitely wanted to have sex with him.”

In her eyes, there would suddenly be a kind of light that hadn’t been there; it arrived and departed like a change of color at the day’s end, as if there were no distance too great for this light to travel. In noting “his vulnerability to scorn,” she emphasized “how touching that was.”

But what about his decision to undergo hand-transplant surgery? Wouldn’t only an adventurer or an idealist run the risk necessary to acquire a new hand?

No one who knew him would ever say he was an adventurer or an idealist, but surely he’d been idealistic once. When he was a boy, he must have had dreams; even if his goals were private, unexpressed, he’d had goals.

His thesis adviser, who was comfortable in the role of expert, attached some significance to the loss of his parents when he was still a college student. But his parents had amply provided for him; in spite of their deaths, he was financially secure. He could have stayed in college until he had tenure—he could have gone to graduate school for the rest of his life. Yet, although he’d always been a successful student, he never struck any of his teachers as exceptionally motivated. He was not an initiator—he just took what was offered.

He had all the earmarks of someone who would come to terms with the loss of a hand by making the best of his limitations. Everyone who knew him had him pegged as a guy who would eventually be content one-handed.

Besides, he was a television journalist. For what he did, wasn’t one hand enough?

But he believed a new hand was what he wanted, and he’d alertly understood everything that could go medically wrong with the transplant. What he failed to realize explained why he had never before been much of an experimenter; he lacked the imagination to entertain the disquieting idea that the new hand would not be entirely his. After all, it had been someone else’s hand to begin with.

How fitting that he was a television journalist. Most television journalists are pretty smart—in the sense of being mentally quick, of having an instinct to cut to the chase. There’s no procrastination on TV. A guy who decides to have hand-transplant surgery doesn’t dither around, does he?

Anyway, his name was Patrick Wallingford and he would, without hesitation, have traded his fame for a new left hand. At the time of the accident, Patrick was moving up in the world of television journalism. He’d worked for two of the three major networks, where he repeatedly complained about the evil influence of ratings on the news. How many times had it happened that some CEO more familiar with the men’s room than the control room made a “marketing decision” that compromised a story? (In Wallingford’s opinion, the news executives had completely caved in to the marketing mavens.)

To put it plainly, Patrick believed that the networks’ financial expectations of their news divisions were killing the news. Why should news shows be expected to make as much money as what the networks called entertainment? Why should there be any pressure on a news division even to make a profit? News wasn’t what happened in Hollywood; news wasn’t the World Series or the Super Bowl. News (by which Wallingford meant real news—that is, in-depth coverage) shouldn’t have to compete for ratings with comedies or so-called dramas.

Patrick Wallingford was still working for one of the major networks when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. Patrick was thrilled to be in Germany on such a historic occasion, but the pieces he filed from Berlin were continually edited down—sometimes to half the length he felt they deserved. A CEO in the New York newsroom said to Wallingford: “Any news in the foreign-policy category is worth shit.”

When this same network’s overseas bureaus began closing, Patrick made the move that other TV journalists have made. He went to work for an all-news network; it was not a very good network, but at least it was a twenty-four-hour international news channel.

Was Wallingford naïve enough to think that an all-news network wouldn’t keep an eye on its ratings? In fact, the international channel was overfond of minute-by-minute ratings that could pinpoint when the attention of the television audience waxed or waned.

Yet there was cautious consensus among Wallingford’s colleagues in the media that he seemed destined to be an anchor. He was inarguably handsome—the sharp features of his face were perfect for television—and he’d paid his dues as a field reporter. Funnily enough, the enmity of Wallingford’s wife was chief among his costs.

She was his ex-wife now. He blamed the travel, but his then-wife’s assertion was that other women were the problem. In truth, Patrick was drawn to first-time sexual encounters, and he would remain drawn to them, whether he traveled or not.

Just prior to Patrick’s accident, there’d been a paternity suit against him. Although the case was dismissed—a DNA test was negative—the mere allegation of his paternity raised the rancor of Wallingford’s wife. Beyond her then-husband’s flagrant infidelity, she had an additional reason to be upset. Although she’d long wanted to have children, Patrick had steadfastly refused. (Again he blamed the travel.)

Now Wallingford’s ex-wife—her name was Marilyn—was wont to say that she wished her ex-husband had lost more than his left hand. She’d quickly remarried, had got pregnant, had had a child; then she’d divorced again. Marilyn would also say that the pain of childbirth—notwithstanding how long she’d looked forward to having a child—was greater than the pain Patrick had experienced in losing his left hand.

Patrick Wallingford was not an angry man; a usually even-tempered disposition was as much his trademark as his drop-dead good looks. Yet the pain of losing his left hand was Wallingford’s most fiercely guarded possession. It infuriated him that his ex-wife trivialized his pain by declaring it less than hers in “merely,” as he was wont to say, giving birth.

Nor was Wallingford always even-tempered in response to his ex-wife’s proclamation that he was an addicted womanizer. In Patrick’s opinion, he had never womanized. This meant that Wallingford didn’t seduce women; he simply allowed himself to be seduced. He never called them—they called him. He was the boy equivalent of the girl who couldn’t say no—emphasis, his ex-wife would say, on boy. (Patrick had been in his late twenties, going on thirty, when his then-wife divorced him, but, according to Marilyn, he was permanently a boy.)

The anchor chair, for which he’d seemed destined, still eluded him. And after the accident, Wallingford’s prospects dimmed. Some CEO cited “the squeamish factor.” Who wants to watch their morning or their evening news telecast by some loser-victim type who’s had his hand chomped off by a hungry lion? It may have been a less-than-thirty-second event—the entire story ran only three minutes—but no one with a television set had missed it. For a couple of weeks, it was on the tube repeatedly, worldwide.

Wallingford was in India. His all-news network, which, because of its penchant for the catastrophic, was often referred to by the snobs in the media elite as “Disaster International,” or the “calamity channel,” had sent him to the site of an Indian circus in Gujarat. (No sensible news network would have sent a field reporter from New York to a circus in India.)

The Great Ganesh Circus was performing in Junagadh, and one of their trapeze artists, a young woman, had fallen. She was renowned for “flying”—as the work of such aerialists is called—without a safety net, and while she was not killed in the fall, which was from a height of eighty feet, her husband/trainer had been killed when he attempted to catch her. Although her plummeting body kil... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.