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Two Thumbs up for The Fourth Hand
Interview
by Alden Mudge
From BookPage Magazine
 There
is something different, something a tad experimental about John Irving's newest
novel, The
Fourth Hand.
Yes, the book offers
the familiar pleasures of any John Irving novel -- a well-turned plot, an antic
mixture of comedy and tragedy, and profound observations about the wounds and
consolations of romantic and sexual love, to name just three.
But the feel of
The Fourth Hand -- its heft, its pacing -- is noticeably different from
previous John Irving novels. For one thing, it is only about half as long as
earlier bestsellers such as A Widow for One Year or The
World According to Garp.
 "I
don't think The Fourth Hand is experimental in any modern sense," Irving
said during a recent call to his home in Vermont. "It is still essentially a
linear novel, and it relies on narrative momentum to move it ahead. But this
is my 10th novel, and it is only the second novel that I've written without
a childhood. I don't give Patrick Wallingford or Mrs. Clausen a childhood. Those
omissions were daunting to me. I always think that my feet are firmly on the
ground as a novelist when I'm telling a whole life. It's hard to imagine a novel
without the effects of the passage of time. That is an experiment for me. I
don't allow more than five or six years of time to pass. So, yes, a major-minor
character is missing, and that character is the passage of time."
It is an omission
with a point, given the fact that Irving is both satirizing the lack of historical
context in what currently passes for television news and examining the emptiness
of the life of television journalist Patrick Wallingford.
 In
the breathtaking first chapter, Wallingford, while on assignment in India, loses
his hand to a circus lion when he instinctively turns to record the lion's roar
and puts his hand too close to the cage. The footage of Wallingford's tragedy
is broadcast again and again to millions around the world, and Wallingford becomes
famous as the "disaster man" and the "lion guy." His obsession with replacing
his missing hand coincides with the obsession of Dr. Nicholas Zajac, a Massachusetts
surgeon who wants to perform the first hand-replacement surgery in the U.S.
Neither Wallingford nor Zajac counts on the complicating presence of Mrs. Otto
Clausen, who donates her dead husband's hand to Wallingford -- and then demands
the right to visit the hand. Wallingford's emotionally difficult relationship
with Mrs. Clausen moves him toward the transformation that is the ultimate point
of the narrative.
"It mattered to
me a great deal that Wallingford be extremely likable," Irving says. "I wanted
him to be the kind of character that if you met him you couldn't help liking
him. Despite his, shall we say, moral insufficiencies, he's not a bad guy. Yet
there's this sort of irritating superficiality about him."
 Irving
embodies Wallingford's superficiality -- and the superficiality of what the
author refers to as "not-the-news network news" -- in a sort of featureless
urban landscape. "My novels generally have a lot of landscape detail, a lot
of atmosphere," Irving says. "Here I tried to make everything like television
itself. There's a kind of sameness to everything. I consciously kept the opening
chapters short and void of landscape, making the pace of the novel as quick
as I could make it right up until Wallingford realizes that it's not the hand
that he's missing, but an integral piece of his life, that he's met her [Mrs.
Clausen] and she's gone away. From that moment on, not only do the chapters
get longer, but the tone of the novel changes considerably."
From that moment
on, Wallingford pursues Mrs. Clausen and grows increasingly discontented with
his career as a television journalist. In the book and in conversation, Irving
is sharply critical of television news. "How many times do we have to see Princess
Di leaving the Ritz!" Irving exclaims at one point in our discussion. "It's
not even a good shot; it's just the last one."
Wallingford's rude
awakening arrives when he chooses to hide out and not cover the biggest story
of the moment -- the John F. Kennedy Jr. plane crash. "I chose the Kennedy episode
because there was nothing about him or his wife that bespoke a sought-after
celebrity," Irving says. "He had it, but he never looked like he wanted it,
so I felt that even in his death he was being violated. We all were. You walk
away from the television set feeling disgusted with yourself that you have watched
it again. Even at the end of four or five days, you've seen nothing new. You've
heard nothing but vapid repetitions of homilies. It's all repetitious stuff.
It's empty."
 Contrast
that with how Irving feels about reading. "I know a lot more about adultery
from reading
Madame Bovary than from hearing about all the myriad divorces
of my friends, which is to say the details are just a little better. I've learned
a lot from reading novels, not only about how I want to write or to tell stories,
but most of what I know about so-called experience. Maybe books don't get enough
acknowledgement for their substitution in many people's lives for personal experience.
The fact that something happened to me is of less interest to me than how well
the tale is told. Personal experience is not all it's chalked up to be."
Little wonder then
that books are part of the emotional currency of the characters in this and
other Irving novels. Wallingford discovers, to his surprise, that Mrs. Clausen,
who works in ticket sales for the Green Bay Packers, is reading The
English Patient. He pursues her, ineptly, by trying to discuss the book
with her.
 In
such well-observed details, The Fourth Hand finds its emotional force.
In fact, The Fourth Hand demonstrates again just how good John Irving
is at dramatizing the positive and negative charges of familial love, especially
the love of a father for a child. "I can't really separate being a writer from
having children," Irving says. "I was an undergraduate when my eldest son was
born. I was already a father with a young child when I was writing my first
novel. When you're writing a novel you must impose a kind of solitariness. But
you can't be alone with your thoughts without having your most pressing anxieties
and concerns foremost in mind. If you have children, they are your most pressing
anxiety and concern."
 Irving
says that he has begun working on a new novel, a longer novel, a narrative that
begins from the point of view of a four-year-old. But he is not yet completely
done with The Fourth Hand. Working with Lasse Hallstrom and Richard Gladstein
(the same team that made the movie of The
Cider House Rules, for which Irving won an Academy
Award), Irving will write the screenplay adaptation of the book. "I'm excited
at the possibility," Irving says at the end of our conversation. "The story
has two elements that I think will make it a good movie
-- an immediate beginning and a good ending. If you've got that, you can't go
too far wrong."
Alden Mudge
writes from Oakland, California.
 
The
Fourth Hand
Read
an excerpt from The
Fourth Hand
The
Fourth Hand on the Book Sense Bestseller
List
Search
for John
Irving's
books on BookSense.com
Further Reading:
Jonathan
Carroll - The Wooden Sea
Louis Begley - on recurring characters
Fergus Bordewich - on writing
the difficult parts
Connie Willis - on truth in fiction.
And the difficult parts.
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