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.
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...
Reviews
The Washington Post Book World...
"A RICH AND DEEPLY MOVING TALE . . . Vintage Irving: a story of two very disparate people, and the strange and unexpected ways we grow . . . Irving's novels are perceptive and precise reflections of the world around us."
USA Today...
" "A BLEND OF SEXUAL FARCE, JOURNALISTIC SATIRE, AND TENDER LOVE STORY . . . From what at first seems bizarre, Irving builds the best kind of love story: an improbable one. Wallingford gets more than a transplanted hand; he begins to find his soul."
Chicago Sun-Times...
"A RIVETING ENTERTAINMENT AND CERTAINLY ONE OF THE FUNNIEST NOVELS OF THE YEAR. The authoritative control of Irving's storytelling has never been more impressive. . . . The delighted reader is powerless to look away."
St. Louis Post Dispatch...
"[A] THOROUGHLY SATISFYING LITERARY EXPERIENCE . . . Irving's most compassionate and redemptive [novel] to date . . . [His] mastery of characterization is unequaled in American novelists of the day."
The Denver Post...
"A BEAUTIFUL STORY ABOUT THE REDEMPTIVE POWER OF LOVE."
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