The Fourth Hand

John Irving

Got to go with Todd's opinion on this one. At the end of the book, in a little author's note, John Irving says he and his wife thought up the idea for this novel when they heard about the first attempted hand transplant. The story concerns a hand transplant recipient who is drawn into a relationship with the donor hand's widow. OK, I can see that transplanting a limb perhaps raises more interesting questions about the previous owner than, say, an internal organ. But I still reckon it's a flimsy basis for a story and even so Irving seems to make a hash of what little material he does have.

Added to that there is the problem of the characters. There are some great Irving characters in this book but they are thoroughly under-used. There is Angie, the TV make-up artist, whose brother Vito telephones her lovers with brutal threats (in this case "Hey, mista no hand ... soon be mista no prick, more like") and who does interesting things with chewing gum during orgasm. They get a handful of pages at most. And there is Dr Zajac, the hand transplant surgeon himself, a brilliant and classic Irving character, whose hobby is playing dogshit lacrosse (that's lacross with turds instead of a ball) and who ends up redeemed by good sex and good cooking. He early on gets a couple of chapters to himself but is later completely written out.

But the main character, Patrick Wallingford, the hand recipient and TV anchor man is almost unrecognisable as an Irving creation. A flimsy character who spends the entire novel bedding tedious women for no apparent reason and with little apparent appetite for the whole business.

And what's going on with the title? It's kind of half-explained in a couple of paragraphs about three quarters of the way through but unless I'm reading it wrong it's a sort of unpleasant sexual reference involving groping. Normally I love Irving's sexual weirdness but even this seemed to strike an off-key note.