"The Fourth Hand" by John Irving

In the end, she loves him back, even though his body rejects her husband's hand and he has to have it removed. When she squeezes his stump between her thighs, Patrick feels the phantom fingers of a "fourth hand" that symbolizes some kind of destiny fulfillment: "There were the two you were born with," Doris tells him. "You lost one. Otto's was your third. As for this one ... this is the one that will never forget me. This one is mine."

Unlike book critic Richard Eder, who starts his New York Times evisceration of "The Fourth Hand" with the premise that "it's hard to say what [an Irving novel] might be other than a good-sized detonation that leaves a relatively shallow crater," I tend to love Irving -- for his dedication to complex, old-fashioned plotting; for his unironic, urgent characters; and for his passion for peculiar, telling details and rhythms of prose. So although there's not much plot in "The Fourth Hand," and characters tend to appear briefly and then never return (as I've hinted, Patrick himself isn't much to write home about) -- I found kernels of familiar delight here, anyhow.

The book has something of Owen Meany's mysticism: Patrick's premonitions (the result of an intense Indian painkiller) suggest that his fate is linked with that of his future hand donor; in some way, he already is Otto, and Otto is him. Irving also demonstrates the same urgent engagement with other people's books we saw in "Son of the Circus" and "Cider House." Here, it's "Stuart Little," "Charlotte's Web" and "The English Patient." Though the thematic ties to White and Ondaatje are hard to grasp (Stuart is on a journey, Patrick is on a journey?), Irving's passion for literature is infectious. And, thank goodness, there is the expected and pitifully lovable smelly dog ("she ate sticks, shoes, rocks, paper, metal, plastic, tennis balls, children's toys, and her own feces"); the less-delightful but still-familiar parody of feminism; and most important, the occasionally thrilling sentence of utter clarity, humor and truth. On Patrick's anorexic surgeon: "[Dr. Zajac's] thinness was compulsive; he couldn't be thin enough. A marathoner, a bird watcher, a seed-eater -- a habit he had acquired from his observation of finches -- the doctor was preternaturally drawn to birds and to people who were famous. He became a hand surgeon to the stars."

Perhaps "The Fourth Hand" is just a quick shot at another bestseller before the glow of the Oscar wears off. Like nearly every other new comic novel on the bookstore shelves, this one is about dating and fear of commitment. Maybe the man thinks this stuff is all people want to read about nowadays; he's just trying to deliver.

But perhaps "The Fourth Hand" is best seen as a transitional novel, moving Irving away from the Dickensian storytelling he's been entrenched in since "The World According to Garp." Could be he's heading toward a looser, more modern form. I truly hope he is. Because when Irving is good, he is very, very good, and when he is bad, he gives me glimpses of something better.

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