John Irving: The Fourth Hand

By JOHN CONNOR

Patrick wallingford is the sort of man most other men would envy and secretly love to hate. Young, handsome, a famous TV reporter, he travels all over the world and every woman he meets wants to have sex with him.

What a wonderful chance for schadenfreude it is therefore when, live on TV, a lion chews off Patrick's left hand. For our further malicious enjoyment Patrick is a bungling incompetent when it comes to using prosthetic hooks and clamps. What he needs is a hand transplant.

Dr Zajoc, the brilliant hand surgeon, takes time out from his hobby of hurling dog excrement around with a lacrosse stick and offers his services.

Doris Clausen offers the hand of her husband, an ardent Green Bay Packers fan who has conveniently blown his brains out in his beer truck after his team's loss to the Denver Broncos. Doris wants only one thing from Patrick in return; visiting rights to her dead husband's hand.

Given all this, The Fourth Hand teeters on the edge, always about to topple over, to become ludicrous and downright distasteful. Occasionally that's exactly what happens. Dr Zajoc's hobby is bad enough but did he really have to adopt a coprophagic dog as well?

Fortunately, John Irving cares too much about his characters to poke fun at them for long. Dr Zajoc is a weirdo but there is nothing weird about the love and devotion he has for his unhappy son. Doris' visiting rights are creepy but there is a strange dignity about her determination to honour her dead husband.

And Patrick, seemingly as inconsequential as the so-called news items he reports, turns out to be a man of compassion and integrity, much more complete without his hand than he ever was before he lost it.

In the end The Fourth Hand, when it shakes off the stuff Irving delights to roll about in, emerges as a sensitive and moving novel, the love and hope of its characters triumphing over the absurd tragedies that fate has inflicted on them.

Bloomsbury

$49.95

* John Connor is an Auckland writer and lecturer.