Handy book (The Fourth Hand - John Irving)

Member Name: demosthenes

Product:	The Fourth Hand - John Irving
Date:	06/09/01 (79 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: short, stays with you

Disadvantages: none

John Irving could be regarded as the Charles Dickens of the twentieth century, and so it is fitting that his most recent book, in the twenty-first century, reveals a new flavour and direction to his writing.

Those of you familiar with Irving’s many large novels will immediately note the relative thinness of The Fourth Hand (in the shops now), and perhaps wonder (as I did) if this is really an Irving novel. Surely it’s missing a few hundred pages, you’ll say to yourself, surely this is volume one of a soon-to-be-completed three volume set? But no, it is a short Irving novel, about the same size as The 158 Pound Marriage. There, wham!, I just contradicted myself – yes, there have been other short Irving novels, but somehow we don’t think of his books in that way, just as one forgets that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is so much smaller than all the others: a carol amongst hymnals. The reason, I believe, is that, like Dickens, Irving’s writing has always teemed with life, has overflowed with character, episode, humour and tragedy. A master of foreshadowing, Irving has so often propelled entire halves of his novels, just as they seem to be coming to a conclusion, with a metaphorical flick of his wrist, into their other halves, releasing a carefully laid narratological trap that opens like a jack-in-a-box the rest of the story that makes up the 400 pages you haven’t read yet.

But The Fourth Hand is different. It is short – there is no hinge that opens a door that reveals a whole other room – it’s all in there, nothing hidden, and yet nothing is completely revealed, and this is what makes it so good, and so different to Irving novels from yesteryear.

Patrick Wallingford is a handsome, you could say beautiful, man who has always been loved by women, and been made love to by many of them. He falls into a career as a television news presenter, just as he has fallen into all aspects of h
is life. His star is on the rise, no-one doubting that he will achieve an anchor chair (the television equivalent of tenure) and continue on to the major networks. But, accident befalls him. Whilst covering a story in India about circus lions, he gets too close to the lion cage at feeding time – a paw darts out, a claw sinks in, and the jaws snap shut, taking Patrick’s hand, on live TV, off at the wrist. Patrick becomes ‘the lion guy’, now identified by his missing hand. The narrative takes us to various women in Patrick’s life and shows the effect of him losing his hand on them, the complete sympathy they all feel for him. But none are as sympathetic as Doris Clausen who immediately makes her husband Otto sign over his hand to Patrick Wallingford. Otto does this because he cannot resist Doris’ voice, the demand it places on him.

There is a hand-surgeon, Dr Zajac, obsessed with dog shit, who wants to be the first to perform a successful hand transplant. When Otto dies (I won’t tell you how or why), Doris keeps a clear head and saves Otto’s hand, then rushes into a meeting with Patrick before finally agreeing to Dr Zajac attempting to transplant Otto’s hand onto Patrick. Doris and Patrick are now connected by Otto’s hand.

I won’t go any further with the plot for fear of spoiling it for you. Hopefully I have managed to indicate the darkness that hovers around the characters in this novel, their motives and relationships. Darkness is not new to Irving, but an economical style is. The story is told almost telegraphically for Irving, whole sections of potential description and exposition simply omitted, the narrative leaping forwards like a bounding gazelle. But it never feels rushed, in fact, quite to the contrary, one wants to go faster. There is a tremendous sense of yearning in the book, begun in the recurring wet dream that Patrick has whilst on some funky painkillers given to him by
an Indian doctor just after his hand is bitten off by the lions. In this dream he flies over a lodge on a remote lake, then is emerging from a swim in the lake, and is pulled into the arms of a woman he loves. This powerful dream pulls the story along, and the reader, and more importantly, it propels Patrick. It is in reference to this dream, and his fervent desire for it to be realised, that Patrick finally begins to take proactive action in his own life, and start creating himself, start creating his own identity. Patrick has always been what women have told him to be, including ‘the lion guy’, but now he wants to be himself.

You can read The Fourth Hand in two ways. As my brother did, laughing and giggling all the way through, delighting in its whackier aspects, and taking it essentially as being the same as any other Irving novel. Or you can read it as I did (not intentionally) as being something new from Irving, humourless, ambiguous (Irving’s self-admitted weakness has always been to explain and describe too much, leaving too little to the reader’s imagination) and dark. I think John Irving has learned a lot from transcribing his fifteen-year-spanning The Cider House Rules novel into a single-year-spanning film: his writing is more focussed than it has ever been before, and less didactic, more willing to release imagery and connectivity to the reader just as he had to leave them to the actors, director and audience when The Cider House Rules became a film.

For more than any other reason, I would recommend this book, and praise it, because it stays with you after you have finished reading it. Resonance is always a mark of success for me, be it from a book, movie, party whatever. It is the things in our life and experience that stay with us, that become a part of us, that keep us thinking and feeling, that are the most important.

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