Cons: Irving's obsession with mutilation; no connection with the characters.
The Bottom Line: Irving burst on the scene two decades ago with his magnum opus, the warmly loony ...Garp. Go read it again, and leave The Fourth Hand on the shelf.
scmrak's Full Review: John Irving - The Fourth Hand: A Novel
The author photo of John Irving on the book jacket of The Fourth Hand shows an impish grin, a sly twinkle that seems lodged permanently in his deepset eyes. Irving gazes up and to his right, presumably communing with his muse. Based on his past work; what a strange muse she must be. And, judging from Irving's most recent novel, she must be tired as well.
It is not that Irving's latest novel fails to demonstrate his fabled gift for developing characters that surpass believablility. Indeed, his readers can certainly believe that characters like Patrick Wallingford and Doris Clausen exist; you may even know such shallow, mildly demented people as Irving's protagonists. It is not that Irving's writing fails to provide the expected flashes of madcap humor; based as always on eccentric folks who find themselves in quirky situations. It is not that Irving's slightly twisted characters fail to provide a rollicking good time -- on occasion, they do. It is that, quite simply, after meeting the likes of Patrick Wallingford that we do not care what happens to him. And that is where The Fourth Hand has gone astray: we cannot connect with the characters.
An Old Theme Revisited
In his previous work Irving has often demonstrated a bizarre fascination with bodily mutilation. A decade or more before the world ever heard of John and Loreena Bobbitt, Irving created Helen Garp's illicit lover Michael, forever diminished in an instance of mid-fellatio whiplash. Also in the The World According to Garp, Irving wrote passionately of the Ellen Jamesian movement, women who amputated their own tongues in protest of a brutal rape. A Prayer for Owen Meany dealt almost incessantly with images of death and mutilation projected against the inherently violent backdrop of Viet Nam.
Now meet "The Lion Guy." Irving's latest amputee is one Patrick Wallingford, talking head on a second-, or even third-rate clone of CNN. Patrick's main claim to fame is that he lost his left hand -- live on camera, no less -- to a bored lion in an Indian circus. Patrick's life seems to change very little in the wake of his loss: the primary difference seems to be that he now must wear his watch on his right hand. His wife, to be true, divorced him, but she was planning on doing so anyway. Patrick's already legendary sex life in fact improves, as women of all ages appear drawn to the world-famous amputee. A thirty-second video of the lion doing the deed, it seems, outsold even the annual NFL Highlights Video.
As a result of his sky-high Q factor, Patrick becomes the news channel's go-to guy for disasters, especially disasters that might be chronicled in the well-known "Darwin Awards." Kill yourself by your own stupidity? Patrick will appear to interview your survivors. Die in a spectacularly idiotic stunt? Guess who'll show for your funeral. That his infirmity has shaped his career seems to trouble Patrick, for he -- like almost all fictitious television reporters -- longs to do "hard" news instead of the fluffy stuff mandated by his editorial staff.
The Certifiably Loony Brilliant Surgeon
Enter the character we've been awaiting since the first word of the book: a classic Irving character, so incredibly detailed that we can almost smell his breath; a character of such stupendous looniness that we want to see him for ourselves. Meet Nick Zajac, hand surgeon extraordinare. Nick -- 5'11" and 135 pounds -- suffers from a quintessential Irving mania: the drive to exercise to a near-comatose condition. The Good Doctor Zajac also suffers from a painful divorce, a vindictive ex-wife who wishes to punish him by withholding their son, and an advanced case of canine coprophobia. What the goofy doc has going for him is a genuine coprophiliac canine named Medea, a son who loves his singing and Stuart Little, and a housekeeper named Irma who falls madly in love with him the instant she sees his skinny, nude body. Oh, yeah, and he also has the chutzpah to think he can transplant a hand onto Patrick's truncated arm.
The Woman of His Dreams
For the long flight home from India, Patrick received a very limited supply of painkiller from his doctor. Not only did his painkiller perform its analgesic duty, it also induced in Patrick a dream so sensual, so tactile, so erotic that the jaded newsman cannot escape its imagery. In it, he makes love to an unseen woman with a voice so sexual that her merest whisper causes instant arousal.
Now meet Doris Clausen, of Appleton, Wisconsin. A lifelong Green Bay Packer fan, she is widowed by an accident of Wallingfordian character. Her husband Otto shoots himself in the cab of his beer truck the night the Packers lose the Super Bowl to Denver (Go, T-Dawg, Go!). Doris -- perhaps a bit obsessive about Patrick's hand -- presents herself and her still cooling dead husband's left hand to Dr. Zajac for transplantation, with but one string attached: she and the hand's recipient must make a baby, and make it RIGHT NOW! Patrick is purely aghast at such a request from a woman whose status as widow is but a few hours old.
Until she uses that voice on him, like some Bene Gesserit witch. And then it's "Turn Out the Lights, The Party's Over" for Patrick; for good.
Why the World Loves John Irving
For sheer hilarity, for absolute goofiness, for completely madcap humor, get thee to a John Irving book! Consider his description of the dog, Medea, whom Dr. Zajac's ex-wife inflicted upon him in hopes of further alienating her son from his father:
The mutt, which came from some humane-society sort of place, was generously referred to as "part Lab." Would that be the black part? Zajac wondered. The dog was a spayed female, about two years old, with an anxious, craven face and a squatter, bulkier body than that of a Labrador retriever...
In veterinary terms, Medea suffered from "dietary indiscretion"; she ate sticks, stones, shoes, rocks, paper, metal, plastic, tennis balls, children's toys, and her own feces. (Her so-called dietary indiscretion was definitely part Lab.) Her zeal for eating dogsh*t was what had prompted her former family to abandon her.
Every chapter, every scene of The Fourth Hand -- like almost all Irving writing -- bears the tracks of a marvelous sense of humor. From the basic premise of the book itself to the tiniest sniping byplay between the partners in Zajac's clinic, every action rides atop a roiling maelstrom of humor. That alone is worth the price of admission, as they say.
News of the World
Patrick's life is the news: not only does he report it, but he is himself a minor but continuing news item. His arrival in a town has become symbolic of vultures descending upon the dead and dying bodies. As fictional TV reporters are wont to do, Patrick bemoans the shallow nature of his profession; its sensationalist practitioners; the triumph of style over substance. When he unwittingingly appears in Boston on the evening of JFK Jr's death, the reaction of a restaurant crowd to his presence stirs his heretofore buried crusader soul. Patrick eventually puts his longing into action, and in his finest moment simply states that enough is enough. More power to him.
Irving Will Be Irving
There are but a few writers who build characters as John Irving can. His protagonists are woven of a cloth of fine sensibility, invariably shot through with glimmering threads of insanity. Ponder, for instance, T. S. Garp: doting father, supportive wrestling coach, homebody, cook... who chases speeders through his neighborhood on foot like a hyperthyroid collie. What other literary character can pin our consciousness, as a butterfly on a blotter, with the audacity of the doomed Owen Meany? Forget for the nonce that his female characters invariably fall into one of two categories: rapacious ex-wives, vacuous sex toys, or both at the same time; Irving can write! the male of the species.
And yet this time Irving has utterly failed to construct a main character with whom the reader can connect. The vapid, self-absorbed Patrick is worlds away from Eddie O'Hare (A Widow for One Year), the eponymous Garp, or even the death-obsessed Owen Meany. Patrick, as described by his ex-wife, was "permanently a boy"; his Peter Pan complex combined with his killer good looks must account for the parade of women passing through his bedroom -- women of all shapes, sizes, and ages.
But Patrick is, in a word, boring. Nick Zajac, the dog turd-flinging hand surgeon, is a more interesting -- and frankly more complex -- character than his famous patient, however he is relegated to but a bit part. We cannot comprehend the loosely structured mind of Patrick Wallingford any more than we can comprehend the strange life thrust upon him by a hungry lion. And that is the failing of The Fourth Hand; for without the connection of reader to character that Irving has engendered so well in many previous works, even his marvelous sense of the absurd cannot pull this chestnut out of the fire.
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