Out on a Limb

'The Fourth Hand' by John Irving

THE FOURTH HAND
By John Irving
Random House. 316 pp. $26.95

When John Irving's work is dismissed -- by critics and readers -- often the crime is sensationalism. There is too much disfigurement, too many dwarfs, too many grotesque and appalling ways to die. A bookseller once told me she had stopped reading Irving's books and never recommended them now simply because there was sure to be something at once horrid and, in her opinion, unrealistic occurring in a car.

Certainly this bookseller was correct that Irving's work is peppered with mutilation, violence and death; and she was also accurate that some of the most lurid moments have indeed taken place in automobiles. What man can forget the castration episode in The World According to Garp? What parent can purge from his memory the scene in A Widow for One Year when the snowplow smashes into the Cole family's rental car and kills the two boys?

Nevertheless, my sense is that Irving's novels are perceptive and precise reflections of the world around us. Spend 10 minutes with the inside pages of virtually any day's newspaper, and it's evident that truth is infinitely stranger than John Irving's fiction. Moreover, though Irving has chronicled the sheer capriciousness of the violence around us -- and the violence we inflict upon one another -- he has always done so with both a sense of irony and a deep awareness of the human cost. His fiction has always had a profoundly accurate moral compass, and he has never shied away from jeremiad.

Any plot summary of Irving's new novel, The Fourth Hand, is likely to reassure his detractors that he has revisited his previous themes and they should steer clear. That would be a shame, since for all its mutilation and moral ranting, it is first and foremost a very sweet love story.

The book is the tale of Patrick Wallingford, a well-meaning but essentially vapid broadcast journalist in Manhattan, and Doris Clausen, an assistant in ticket sales with the Green Bay Packers in Wisconsin. The two become linked when Wallingford has his left hand and a sizable portion of his left arm ripped off and eaten by lions in an Indian circus -- yes, live on television -- and Doris's husband accidentally shoots himself to death in his beer delivery truck after the Packers lose a Super Bowl.

Given the late Otto Clausen's left hand, Wallingford becomes the nation's first hand transplant. Yet there is even more connecting Wallingford and Clausen: Clausen, in her mid-thirties, had been trying (and failing) to get pregnant since she married, and in Wallingford the desperate woman sees a handsome and successful sperm donor ("You're like a pretty girl who has no idea how pretty she is," she tells him at one point). She seduces him immediately before the transplant surgery (she knows he will be in no condition post-op) and does indeed conceive "little Otto." The beauty of the novel is the way the tony, urban, media-savvy Wallingford falls for Clausen, only to discover that she wanted his genes and visitation rights with his -- er, Otto's -- left hand but has absolutely no desire for a relationship with him. If he is to have any chance at all with her, a Midwestern girl whom he finds more alluring than the myriad, more sophisticated women he's slept with, he has massive amounts of growing up to do.

There are no sections in The Fourth Hand that are meant to be laugh-out-loud funny, but it is difficult to read lengthy passages without smiling. Sometimes the absurdity is Irving at his most deliciously crude, as when Wallingford's Boston hand surgeon, a dedicated jogger, uses his college lacrosse stick to hurl the dog poop in his path into the Charles River, oblivious to any crew teams that might at that moment be on the water. At other times, however, the humor is more gentle and wry: When Wallingford's hand and lower arm are being consumed by the big cats at the Indian circus, Wallingford's charisma with females (save Doris Clausen) affects even the animals: "Not one lioness had touched his hand. There was a measure of longing in the sadness in their eyes; even after Wallingford fainted, the lionesses continued to watch him. It almost seemed that the lionesses were smitten, too."

The novel also possesses a mystical quality, which Irving renders with particular care. When Wallingford is recovering in India after he has lost his hand, he is given a painkiller that he is told is illegal in the United States and will soon be taken off the market in India, too. The cobalt-blue capsule turns out to be a "prescience pill," and under its influence Wallingford is sure he has been given a glimpse of his future: He is on a deck on a lake he has never seen, and the vividness of the dream is such that he can feel "the dock against his bare back, the roughness of its planks through a towel." Suddenly he hears "a woman's voice -- like no other woman's voice Wallingford had ever heard, like the sexiest voice in the world," suggesting they take off their suits because their suits are cold from swimming and the dock will be warm.

He has never in his life been as happy as he is in that dock in that dream, and when he meets Doris Clausen -- and he realizes it was her voice that he had heard in his painkiller-fed reverie -- he knows he wants nothing more than to find a way (literally and metaphorically) to that lake with its fir trees and white pines. Certainly some readers will find Irving's rants about television and television news needlessly long (and long-winded), and there is little in them that hasn't been said before, (in some cases, by Irving himself). Likewise, the moments we spend watching Wallingford try to connect with Clausen through The English Patient and Stuart Little feel more like small, gracious paeans to books Irving seems to cherish than pertinent attempts to propel the plot forward.

Nevertheless, The Fourth Hand is a rich and deeply moving tale, and (in the best sense) vintage John Irving: a story of two very disparate people, and the strange and unexpected ways we may grow. •

Chris Bohjalian is the author of seven novels, including "Midwives," "The Law of Similars" and "Trans-Sister Radio."