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The Fourth Hand John Irving 9789023462408 Books

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The Fourth Hand John Irving 9789023462408 Books

Boy gets gotten by too many girls; boy finds THE one and somehow doesn't blow it.
Amoral drifting, hilarious bumbling, scathing dissection of the news media, mysticism, the emptiness of passivity, feminism, ageism, racism, and the joy of parenting are rolled seamlessly into one rollercoaster ride of a story. And then there's the lost left hand at the center of it all. I loved it. Lots of reasons.


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The Fourth Hand John Irving 9789023462408 Books Reviews

John Irving's characters are different and real. His prose and descriptions are on target and flow smoothly. This is not a page turning beach read but is a fun read and was worth my time. Good job Mr. Irving.
I am a HUGE Irving fan. I may not have read everything he has done, but I have loved all I have read Owen Meany, Cider house, Hotel New Hampshire, Garp, Until I find you and a Son of the Circus. In all his writings, including this one, Irving has made the most horrific imagery surprisingly laughable and believable at the same time. For me, this book is missing about 300 pages, and a few sadistic, yet tragically comic twists and turns. As others have reviewed, it just feels like he gave up in the middle of this book and said, "Screw it, I'll just write a happy ending right now." I was waiting for the crazy brother of Angie to hack off the other hand, or something tragic to happen to little Otto, in the form of losing a hand himself, but it seems that Irving kind of petered out of creative genius, just to write a book that would easily take the form of a Hollywood flop someday. Maybe it was Irving's whole plan to leave us all hanging for once (which WAS unexpected!) but I feel it backfired as we have all come to expect the unexpected in a way that without it we are just left....
You don't even have to check the title page when you see the plot summary reporter for sleazy cable news operation gets his hand bitten off by a lion, and a surgeon offers his service if a donor hand is found. One is, only the widow of the donor demands visiting rights. This has to be a John Irving novel, right? And it is of course. Question 13 in those ditsy little discussion group questions that seem to be appearing at the end of every paperback novel these days asks you to ponder this "In what way does this novel have elements of a fairy tale or fable?"
For two-thirds of the way through, the answer seems obvious all ways. Mr. Irving has created a surrealistically marvelous, portrayal of the news media and the people who populate it (the action in the novel is set against real-life events such as a Super Bowl game the Green Bay Packers lost and the weekend John F. Kennedy Jr. died). Patrick Wallingford, the victim, known forever after to the public as "The Lion Guy," manages to sleep with nearly every woman he becomes involved with, the widow of the man whose hand Wallingford has been given seems somewhat demented, while the hand surgeon himself, unhappily divorced, seems more obsessed with doggydo than hand surgery. In short, everyone in Wallingford's world seem at least slightly dysfunctional.
But then in the last third, it all goes wobbly and sentimental, as the action moves from the Boston-New York axis to Green Bay, and the character of the widow, Doris Clausen, becomes (just when you were imagining Drew Barrymore playing her in the movie version), well, Rene Zellweger, while Wallingford--who you've been imagining as Jim Carrey--morphs into Robin Williams. The last two chapters slog on interminably. It's "love stuff" time. And sadly, as Mr. Irving's author's note at the end indicates, this was intentional. Indeed, question 14 asks you "Would you call `The Fourth Hand' a Love Story'? Why or why not?"
Well now! As the cable news channel satirized here would no doubt trumpet, "we report, you decide."
Notes and asides Mr. Irving gets moon phases right (unlike so many authors) a moon two or three days from full will indeed set at about 300 a.m.
One of the best John Irving books I have read. It reminds me of Harp, my favorite Irving, in its hilarity bordering on absurdity. Even though it will make you laugh at times, it also has depth and real feeling. I loved it.
I'm apparently a lone voice crying in the wilderness on this one, but I found it a good read. No, it hasn't got some of the dimension and nuance of some of the other Irving books, but bear in mind that my favorite Irving work is "A Son of the Circus" -- for crying out loud, guys, a book doesn't have to be deep and profound to be good! Sometimes, it's enough that it just be fun.
I wasn't prepared to like Pat Wallingford, but his character got under my skin by the end of the book. He ended up a sort of endearing bumbler, vulnerable despite his apparent "made for television" slickness. He reminded me of Inspector Dhar from "Circus". Certain of the scenes in the book (dog turd lacrosse, the tryst between Patrick and Angie) were laugh-out-loud funny. And the ending was as marginally anticlimactic as most such scenes are in life. That's a great bit of restraint, to sacrifice drama for verisimilitude -- and in an Irving ending, restraint is a rare virtue indeed.
Perhaps we've become spoiled by Irving, the way he tends to spin such a great yarn while creating such unforgettable and nuanced characters as Homer Wells and Owen Meany . . . I don't think that was what this book was *for*. Vonnegut seldom bothered to develop a character beyond a strange situation and a beguiling turn of phrase! Why should it be a sin when Irving does it?
I liked it. I'll read it again.
"The Fourth Hand" is somewhat interesting and entertaining, but certainly not on par with Irving's masterpieces. In the afterward, Irving explains that he wanted to write a comedy and a love story. He did. The first half of the book is a comedy, something like a slapstick Garp, and the second half is something of a ho-hum love story. Boy meets girl; girl has doubts; boy wins her over. Where is the tension? Why the abrupt shift in the middle? What is the purpose? The subplot about the doctor is equally without conflict.

This book feels like some kind of contractual obligation that Irving had with his publisher.
Boy gets gotten by too many girls; boy finds THE one and somehow doesn't blow it.
Amoral drifting, hilarious bumbling, scathing dissection of the news media, mysticism, the emptiness of passivity, feminism, ageism, racism, and the joy of parenting are rolled seamlessly into one rollercoaster ride of a story. And then there's the lost left hand at the center of it all. I loved it. Lots of reasons.