Give the boy a hand

The Fourth Hand
By John Irving
Random House, 313 pages
Available at National Book Store

Novelist John Irving has been validated. After winning an Oscar for writing the screenplay to his novel, The Cider House Rules, Irving has lots more reasons to keep on doing what he does: knocking out a quirky novel every one or two years, pleasing his many fans, and turning off those critics who abhor his cutesy, yet validated, quirkiness.

The Fourth Hand, his latest (relatively short) novel, concerns a handsome TV anchorman/field reporter who loses his left hand to a hungry circus lion while covering a story in India. Millions of TV viewers watch horrified as Patrick Wallingford’s hand is chomped off and fed upon by a cage full of felines. Minus a hand, he becomes known to the public as "the lion guy" and "disaster man" (after the accident, his network sends him exclusively to cover horrible disaster scenes).

Despite his "handicap," Patrick is extremely good-looking and practically irresistible to women, who usually end up seducing him. This leaves him rather shallow and vain, and about as superficial as you would expect a TV anchorman to be. However, eventually Patrick gets a chance to undergo a radical hand-transplant operation under the quirky hands of Dr. Nicholas Zajac, a Boston hand surgeon with a compulsive habit of picking up stray dog poo from public lawns with a lacrosse stick, which he then compulsively tosses into the Charles River. (I warned you: these are the types of character quirks Irving seems to adore.)

A perfect hand donor conveniently pops up (through Zajac’s crass yet effective www.needahand.com website) when Wisconsin beer delivery man Otto Clausen accidentally shoots himself on the night of the XXXIInd Super Bowl. The bereaved wife, Doris Clausen, has sympathetically followed Wallingford’s TV career ever since the hand incident and offers her recently-deceased hubby’s hand for the transplant. But her attachment to the hand, she finds, is as strong as her bond with her deceased husband.

That, in a nutshell, is the setup for The Fourth Hand, which, as Irving novels go, is pretty thin gruel. The author gets to poke fun at TV celebrity, ruminate on the death of JFK, Jr., and trot out a lot of interesting medical research about caring for and adapting to transplanted limbs. And, in fact, his storytelling ease is as much on hand (sorry) as in previous novels such as The World According to Garp and A Widow for One Year.

Yet something is missing here – and it’s not just Patrick Wallingford’s limb. At 315 pages, The Fourth Hand seems more like a collection of quirks and tics, rather than a fleshed-out attempt at capturing something real in depth. Irving has said he got the idea for the novel while watching a TV medical show about hand transplants; he wondered how the donor felt. His wife commented, "I wonder if the donor’s wife gets visitation rights with the hand." Such was the inspiration for The Fourth Hand.

There are definitely ideas here: the persistence of love seems to be one of the author’s themes this time, as is the question of character. Can Wallingford, a pampered TV celebrity who has tasted tragedy yet remains shallow and clueless, ever hope to change?

You’ll have to dance your way through a lot of Irving’s patented authorial intrusions to find out. As a narrator, Irving has a long-standing tradition of commenting on the unfolding story, like a 21st century Charles Dickens writing by candlelight. It’s a creaky, annoying habit that assumes the reader can’t figure out what is happening on the page without the author standing over his or her shoulder, spelling things out. ("Irma, don’t forget, was in love. What did she care?" is one example; "This was typical of how little Hildred had understood him; that he lost his temper at dogshit didn’t mean he was angry at dogs!" is another.)

But this apparent infatuation with question marks, exclamation points and the author’s own voice is apparently what Irving fans have come to expect, and love, in his writing. Though the habit settled down a bit in 1999’s more satisfying A Widow for One Year, it’s back now in full force in The Fourth Hand. Maybe Irving is the one whose hands have become possessed by unwelcome spirits.