I think the standard understanding of John Irving’s “best run” is between 1978 and 1998 - between The World According to Garp and A Widow for One Year. Of course this both discounts 1994’s A Son of the Circus (an ambitious misfire) and his stellar latter-day work (Until I Find You, Last Night in Twisted River, and In One Person). In between those run of great novels is the short The Fourth Hand, a book that’s very good, but stops short of great.

Irving works in layered tragicomedy. Good people often die in his books, or are horribly maimed, but there’s often enough good humor to buoy some of the darkness. The Fourth Hand is trying to be fully comic - despite the dismemberment hinted at by the title - as sort of a commentary on rubbernecking culture and 24-hour news disaster porn. It’s actually written into the text: our main character, Patrick Wallingford, is an anchor on a disaster porn network. He’s not particularly smart and his best asset is that he’s handsome. He’s also kind of a philanderer in part because of his handsomeness. This gets him both into and out of trouble, but because this is trying to be a comedy, those outcomes seem more random than anything.

2/3 into the book, the characters seem to wake up to the fact that they’re in a John Irving novel and the tone shifts. This could have been intentional on Irving’s part. The newfound pathos in the shallow characters, especially Wallingford ... well, it’s not exactly unearned but it’s not exactly earned, either.

But if course, most lesser Irving is still good Irving. In the book’s best moments - and there are fantastic moments - The Fourth Hand can stand with Irving’s greats. As a whole, though, like with Irving’s semi-sympathetic main character, there’s just something missing.

Irving je nevjerojatno dobar pripovjedač čak i kad mu priče iskoče iz fokusa i kad ubaci nepotrebne, neuklopljene djelove.

Sad već očekujem da su mu likovi uvrnuti, a događaji nepredvidljivi i silno me zabavlja kud me njegova mašta odvede. Pustim se i plutam.

Volim ovakve knjige koje me natjeraju da preorganiziram dan i stvorim si vrijeme za čitanje jer me vuče znatiželja.

This is something of a lesser work, I would think, for Irving, who I consider to be one of the best living American novelists. This is really a 3 star book that elevates itself to the fourth star purely on the strength of the author's writing. I love the flow of Irving's text; the smoothness of his sentences. It's all in here, too.

Irving thinks this is a comic love story. I'm not sure I agree. In its depictions, characterizations, and outcomes it's darker than that. To a degree that's hard to overcome, the part he thinks is a love story is a story of obsessive desire, betrayal (more than once), and ambiguity. It's very involved in sexual politics and psychological dysfunctions. There's no one I would necessarily categorize as "sane" in this novel. That being said, they are definitely "Irving characters".

The "love story" is between a man who works for a "disaster news" channel - the type that only focuses on weird and tragic ways people die. While putting together a piece on the death of a circus performer when he caught his wife, an aerialist, when she fell, he loses his hand to a hungry lion. Way too close there, man. He "falls in love"/"develops an obsession" for the young widow from Green Bay, Wisconsin, who donates her dead husband's hand for a hand transplant with two conditions. One: It goes to Patrick "lion guy" Wallingford. Two: She gets visitation rights. Strangely, they work all of this out. Her only description, outside of her general withdrawal after her husband dies, is that her voice is in a certain register that seems to always excite men.

There's a wild sub-plot dealing with the surgeon's bizarre life (divorce, distant 6 year old son, adoring maid who's trying to get him to sleep with/marry her, fecal obsessed dog, passion for lacrosse). There are also weird side stories in the workplace (the producer who wants Wallingford to impregnate her. The much younger makeup girl who he finds unaccountably attractive. Her brother a young Italian from New York City likes to call him in the middle of the night to threaten him. Her parents, a transit copy and his wife, both call repeatedly during their first encounter. She nearly chokes to death on chewing gum, but they still manage to complete the act. It's all very odd.

Anyway...this one is one I don't feel like I'll probably need to read again, although I'm not sorry I did. There are things along the way that make it worthwhile, and Wallingford does come around, by the end of the story, to a much more rounded and healthy point-of-view. Don't read this if you are looking for likeable female characters, though. The only one presented as having anything like a good disposition, personality, and attitude toward life is the makeup artist. At least she knows how screwy her life is.

Długo nie "wchodziło", ale jak już weszło to ojezusmaria.

Irving never lets you down.

This one follows a vapid but handsome TV journalist who blindly meanders through life exhibiting no agency of his own. His good looks and natural charm keep him effortlessly employed, adored, and in bed with beautiful women. Naturally he ends up completely unsatisfied with life, so the bulk of the novel tracks his progressions through years of transformative moments. All of Irving’s charming style is on display here: the zany eccentricities, the inventively apt metaphors, the easy conversational wit, and the eye for characterizing detail. On the other hand the protagonist is an eye-roll-eliciting mary-sue to the point of distraction, not one Irving’s memorable Dickensian characters, and Irving’s penchant for tangential plotlines and his wide cast of characters drag this one out too long. There is a general theme that ties the disparate ends of this book together though, and Irving develops it with his signature life-affirming kindness: if you are going to acquiesce to something, acquiesce to love. It’s a sweet message, sweetly told in what is likely one of Irving’s worst books. If you are an English major looking for a paper to write, it’s easy to speculate the influence this book had on Andrew Sean Greer’s composition of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Less (2017).

Wat een rommel.

I have loved previous John Irving books, but this one was disappointing. I didn’t like the way the female characters were portrayed. They were always described by their looks and wether they were attractive or not. None of the female characters rang true. It just wasn’t believable. I did enjoy the last 100 pages but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Fast Paced Fun

I must tell you right up front that I am an unabashed John Irving fan. So, “the fourth hand is a book that I found fantastic fun exciting and witty.

Irving combines both a comedy and a romance story in one book – – gifted and amazing. Now for many Irving sense of comedy is completely off-the-wall unless you’re willing to go there with him it can even be called weird. I am an off-the-wall kind of guy so I totally 100% loved it.

Characters are strong, maybe not relatable, but very well explained and easy to follow.

I love this book I loved Irving and I highly recommend it

4.5 Stars. I really enjoyed this. I sympathized with Wallingford and I’m so glad he got the promise of the life he wanted. I still liked Owen Meany better but this is a close 2nd.

Each John Irving book I read continued to just get worse and worse.

This novel follows the highlights and troughs in the life of Patrick Wallingford, a journalist working for a trashy 24-hour TV news station.

Whilst covering a story in India, he gets one of his hands bitten off by a circus lion. A surgeon shows interest in trying a hand transplant, and shortly after this Doris Clausen, a newly widowed woman who saw the lion episode on television, offers one of her husband's hands for the operation....on the condition she can have visiting rights to see the hand after the transplant.

Wallingford has always been hugely attractive to women, and keeps falling mindlessly into bed with them. His life as a rather gormless libertine is disrupted by the entry of Mrs Clausen into his life.

Whilst I liked the eccentric storyline in the book, I never felt any great emotion towards any of the characters. The parts I enjoyed most were the descriptions of the news station - the politics, the scheming, and the laying bare of the shallow nastiness of its journalism. But that wasn't nearly enough to keep me hooked.

This is my first John Irving book though, and what I have picked up on is the vast wave of admiration that thousands of people feel for his writing. Many people describe him as their favourite author. I shall have to read another of his books and see how I get on with that.