The Fourth Hand
by John Irving

List Price: $14.95
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345449347
Publisher: Ballantine

John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire in 1942. He was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and University of New Hampshire, and also attended the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop where one of his teachers was Kurt Vonnegut.

His first novel, SETTING FREE THE BEARS, was published in 1968. The Water-Method Man was his second novel (1972), followed by The 158-Pound Marriage (1974), Hotel New Hampshire (1981), Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), and A Widow for One Year (1998) among others.

His novel, A Son of the Circus (1995), was arguably his most different and difficult. Irving's least "American" novel, A Son of the Circus deals with issues of identity. Ever present, though, are many of John Irving's favorite (and unusual) motifs and themes --- dwarfs, prostitutes, lust, moral offense, faith. John Irving fans will once again enjoy his amusing characters and their outrageous pursuits.

John Irving has won an O. Henry Award, a National Book Award, and an Oscar. The Fourth Hand is his tenth novel. He lives in Vermont and Toronto.

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Why I Wrote The Fourth Hand When I Wrote It

My sixth novel, The Cider House Rules, was published in 1985, by which time I had already started my seventh, A Prayer for Owen Meany. That year I also began writing the screenplay of Cider House, for which (fifteen years later)I would win an Academy Award. But the first draft of that screenplay was a nine-hour movie; it wouldn't have won anybody an Oscar.

Rewriting is what I do best as a writer. I spend more time revising a novel or a screenplay than I take to write the first raft. And 1985 marked the beginning of what has been, to date, a seventeen-year-old habit -- namely, writing at least one screenplay concurrently with whatever novel I am writing. Nothing has helped my process of revision more.

It sounds strange, but my novels have bene fited from my interrupting them. (It's mildly frustrating that the best time to interrupt a novel is when it's going well; during the novelist's absence, a novel that's off to a good start only stands to get better, but a struggling novel will become more difficult. )For two to four months, which is about how long I need to write a draft of a screenplay, I don't even read my novel-in-progress -- I try, with mixed results, to not even think about it. And when I return to the novel, I invariably discover new possibilities in the storytelling; these are things I would have missed if I'd been a horse with blinders on, plodding ahead on a solitary project.

In December 1998, when I was on the film set of The Cider House Rules, it occurred to me that I would like to write a comedy, a comedy and a love story -- a book of a kind I hadn't written since my second novel, The Water-Method Man, thirty years before.

That movie set, at the end of a sixty-two-day shooting schedule, was in Northampton, Massachusetts; the interiors of the orphanage in the film were shot in the former Massachusetts State Hospital, in buildings that had been derelict (and unheated)for fifteen years. It was cold, it was snowing, and the melting snow was turning to slush. One of the children who was acting the part of an orphan had a runny nose and a cough. It depressed me that, for more than twenty-five years -- during the writing of seven novels and the Cider House screenplay -- I had been imagining places as abandoned and melancholic as this orphanage hospital with its ether-addicted doctor.

The wife of the narrator in The 158-Pound Marriage survives the rape and pillage of her Austrian birthplace by hiding in the carcass of a cow. In The World According to Garp, a famous woman is assassinated by a man who hates women; her famous son is murdered by a woman who hates men. In A Prayer for Owen Meany, the narrator has his right index finger cut off by his best friend -- to keep him from being drafted during the Vietnam War. Later, the best friend is killed -- not in the war in Vietnam but because of it.

In A Son of the Circus, two children die and a dwarf is blown up by a terrorist's bomb. In A Widow for One Year, two more children die and a prostitute is murdered -- and a mother walks out on her four-year-old daughter, not to return for thirty-five years. Such sadness seemed to cry out for a comedy, if only for a change. And wouldn't a love story be a breath of fresh air?I thought so.

That night I drove home from the film set wanting to write a novel that was both a comedy and a love story. It should be short, I thought -- if not a short novel by other people's standards, at least short for me. (Since The World According to Garp, which was published in 1978, my novels have been long. )The problem was, I had already started the research for another novel -- another long one.

Once in the spring of 1998, and again in the fall of that year, I had visited Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, and Helsinki. The novel, which concerns the doomed relationship between the daughter of an Edinburgh tattoo artist and a church organist who abandons her, is neither a comedy nor a love story. The tattoo artist's daughter becomes a tattoo artist herself; the church organist is addicted to being tattooed. Their illegitimate son tells the story.

Until I Find You, which I am still writing, is my first first-person narrative since A Prayer for Owen Meany, but it was not the novel I was thinking about as I drove home from Northampton that day. And only a month later, in January 1999, my wife, Janet, gave me the idea that set The Fourth Hand in motion. As I say in the Acknowledgments, we were watching the news on television -- a story about the first hand-transplant surgery in the United States. Janet wondered what would happen if the hand-donor's widow wanted to visit her late husband's hand -- that is, after the attachment surgery. And there it was:a comedy and a love story, surely. In forty-eight hours, I knew more about The Fourth Hand than I knew about the novel I had been trying to begin for a year. I put my notes on Until I Find You away; I wouldn't return to that novel for three years.

The Fourth Hand starts out as a comedy -- even a satire, even a farce -- and ends up as a love story. Patrick Wallingford, the hand-recipient, is a largely comic character -- at least until he falls in love with the widow, Mrs. Clausen. Dr. Zajac, the hand-surgeon, is a comic character, too. In the earliest chapters, the doctor and his patient are on a comedic collision course. But the real collision (between Wallingford and Mrs. Clausen)you don't see coming, and with it comes a change in tone.

The first, comic chapters of the novel are short; they are a jumble of quick cuts, not unlike the truncated news on television, which is Patrick Wallingford's dissatisfying and super ficial business. The later chapters, beginning with Mrs. Clausen's eleventh-hour introduction into the story -- and especially after Wallingford loses his left hand for the second time -- are longer and slower; the narrative reins in its hectic pace. When Wallingford falls in love with Mrs. Clausen, the comedy vanishes and a melancholy familiar to readers of my more recent novels creeps in.

There are love stories about people who seem " meant for " each other; there are those couples who strike everyone as " belonging " together. Not Patrick Wallingford and Mrs. Clausen. He is careless and shallow -- as vacuous as television journalists often are -- while she is thoughtful and deep. Wallingford has never grown up; in his ex-wife's opinion, he's still a boy. Mrs. Clausen, on the other hand, is very much an adult; she is emotionally and psychologically complex. And, as she points out to Patrick at the end of the novel, she's lost more than a left hand -- she's lost a husband she truly loved.

When Wallingford tells Mrs. Clausen that he loves her, the best she can tell him is that she's going to try to love him, too. He has to accept her as she is; she is giving him what she can, which is all she has left. For a novel with such a comic beginning, The Fourth Hand isn't the least bit funny at the end. The love story eclipses the comedy, and it's a dark and grown-up love story -- a commitment with an uncertain future. Both characters are taking a risk.

And perhaps what's missing from The Fourth Hand is as interesting as what the novel contains. In my nine other novels, the passage of time -- usually a lifetime but always a signi ficant number of years -- is as important to the story as a major character. In the other novels, the effect of the passage of time is central to the plot. Not much time passes in The Fourth Hand. (About five years, maybe?) Furthermore, it is my usual practice to give at least one major character a childhood; the effect of childhood on my characters (as adults)is also central to my story-telling. But Patrick Wallingford's childhood is mentioned only in passing, and Mrs. Clausen's not at all. (Remember:I wanted The Fourth Hand to be a relatively short novel. )

In the years I was writing the screenplay of The Cider House Rules, I radically reduced the childhood of the main character. In the novel, Homer Wells's childhood is a whole chapter -- the first one. In the movie, Homer's childhood and his several failed adoptions are brie fly sketched in a montage that plays over the opening credits. In the novel, Homer leaves the orphanage for fifteen years; in the film, he stays away for only two .

It was screenwriting that taught me how to tell a story without establishing the life of a main character in a childhood, and without a signi ficant passage of time. In these two respects, The Fourth Hand is very much a post-screenplay novel. A view from a window -- not a whole view, and not of a whole life. Three characters whose lives cross -- a doctor, his patient, and the provider of a missing body part. We know them only as well as people we've known for just a few years.

Wallingford doesn't really need a new left hand; he can learn to live without one. (As a medical ethicist might say, a hand is not essential in order to live . )What Wallingford needs is a new life, a real one. What Mrs. Clausen wants is a baby, and she uses her late husband's hand to get one. When we see her in Dr. Zajac's office, where she first meets Wallingford and so forcefully seduces him, we think (as Wallingford does)that she must be crazy. But Mrs. Clausen is both the sanest and the saddest person in the novel; her feet are very firmly on the ground. Theirs is a collision between a woman as fiercely determined as American football and a man as insubstantial (but good-looking)as his anchor role on TV news.

That day on the film set of The Cider House Rules , I dreamed about writing a comedy and a love story. I wanted it to be short, and it was. I wanted it to be funny and romantic, and I think it is. But I also wanted to escape the melancholy of so many of my novels, especially the more recent ones -- and I couldn't. From the moment I met Mrs. Clausen, she brought her own melancholy with her. Like the lion guy, I was irresistibly rawn to her. The Fourth Hand became her story; even the title is Mrs. Clausen's invention. She is not to be denied.

    -- - John Irving

Excerpted from The Fourth Hand © Copyright 2008 by John Irving. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.

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