The author's tenth novel charts events and emotions in the life of a newscaster whose fame skyrockets when his left hand is eaten by a lion on camera. When the "widow" of a transplant hand accompanies the appendage to meet the handsome amputee, the determined woman more or less coerces him into sex and conceives the child she's longed for. What follows is a mostly enjoyable trip, abundant in the quirks and themes familiar to Irving's legion of fans: scatological humor, women's rights activism, the rewarding stress of fatherhood, sports metaphors, circuses, and the chronic normality of eccentricities. Irving's worlds are ludicrous in the most appealing way and expertly sentimental at the same time, and his approachable language can be both musical and magical. But here, the promising fiction takes a sharp right turn to autopsy the real-life tragedies of the JFK Jr. and Egypt Air plane crashes Tom Wolfe-type reportage that we certainly don't look for from Irving. Perhaps more disappointing is that the protagonist is motivated primarily by shockingly unoriginal doubts about and eventual disdain for the news media's morbid coverage of world events. Irving's fiction is often moral in its own way, but the moral has never come so close to obscuring the narrative as in this book. The author's magic rules the day, but recent history plays too large a role here to make this the fiction for which he'll be remembered. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/01.] Doug McClemont, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A handsome TV newsman has his left hand chomped off by a hungry lion, and a former lacrosse star stays in game shape by hurling dog turds into the Charles River . . . hmmm, probably not the new Eudora Welty novel, you say? Right you are. It's Irving, up to his old tricks again (and are they ever getting old), aiming for the savage comic irony of his best novel (The World According to Garp, 1978) and instead recycling the arbitrary whimsy that produced his worst (The Hotel New Hampshire, 1981). This one begins when Patrick Warrington, who's covering the Great Ganesh Circus in India for a thrills-oriented media operation reviled throughout the industry as "the calamity channel," stands too close to the lions' cage, and suffers the mutilation that will elicit gasps around the world from the many women who have loved (and will love) him. Among the latter is Doris Clausen of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who impulsively offers a donor hand from her husband Otto (inconveniently, still alive). Otto complies by killing himself (whether he's despairing over a Packers' loss is unclear), and all seems well-though Doris is demanding "visitation rights" with Otto's hand. Eminent Boston hand surgeon Nicholas Zajac (the former lacrosse player, whose own problems with women are threaded intermittently throughout the narrative) attaches Otto's mitt, whose imperfect functioning is prelude to the experiences of fatherhood and real love (as opposed to lots and lots of gratuitous sex), which finally make a man of Patrick, despite his disability. Irving presumably means all this to be a Dickensian fable of renunciation and healing, but it's a self-indulgent mishmash of let's-see-what-weird-things-I-can-come-up-with-next plotting and complacent commentary laid on by a very heavy, omniscient authorial, uh, hand. Recently Irving has been alternating his usual doorstoppers with slighter books like the miscellany Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996) and the memoir My Movie Business (1999). Don't be fooled by The Fourth Hand. He's still between novels.

A touch of the bizarre has always enlivened Irving's novels, and here he outdoes himself in spinning a grotesque incident into a dramatic story brimming with humor, sexual shenanigans and unexpected poignancy. While reporting on a trapeze artist who fell to his death in India (shades of Irving's A Son of the Circus), handsome TV anchorman Patrick Wallingford experiences a freak accident his left hand is chewed off by a lion. Wallingford's network, a low-rent pseudo-CNN, promotes the video of the accident, making Wallingford notorious world-wide as "the lion guy." Five years after the accident, Wallingford is made whole via the second hand-transplant ever. The hand comes with a strange condition, however. It belonged to Otto Clausen, who willed it to Wallingford at wife Doris's instigation, and Doris wants visiting rights. On her first meeting with Wallingford, they have sex, Wallingford recognizing Doris's voice as one he heard in a vision in India while recovering from his accident. Doris, desperate to get pregnant, has her own agenda. Soon, in a sort of reversal of Taming of the Shrew, she is teaching the normally satyric Wallingford to domesticate his libido. Irving is not aiming for a grand statement in this novel, but something closer to the lovers-chasing-lovers structure of farce. As in all good comedy, there are some fabulous villains, chief among them Wallingford's sexually Machiavellian boss, Mary, who also wants to conceive his baby. Irving's set pieces are on that high level of American gothic comedy he has made uniquely his own the scene in which Wallingford goes to bed with a gum-chewing makeup girl is particularly irresistible. Refreshingly slim in comparison with Irving's previous works, and written with a new crispness, this fast-paced novel will do more than please Irving's numerous fans it will garner him new ones. (July 10) Forecast: An arresting cover, 300,00 first printing and Irving's perennial popularity will launch this book, a BOMC main selection, onto the charts with brio. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Irving is compulsively readable in spite of his pedestrian social commentary and his bossy habit of telling the reader what his characters are all about rather than letting them reveal their inner selves. His hapless hero, the overly handsome Patrick Wallingford, a New York television reporter for an all-news station specializing in bizarre disasters, beds any woman who flirts with him and doesn't care if his wife knows or not. Such fecklessness begs for retribution, and Patrick's is as surreal as it is brutal. Irving revisits the setting he so enjoyed in A Son of the Circus (1994) by sending Patrick to India to cover a story about a trapeze artist whose husband died trying to catch her as she plunged to the earth, the first and most literal of a series of man-crushing females. A woman even causes the confusion that results in Patrick losing his left hand to a cageful of hungry circus lions. Much subdued, he decides to get a hand transplant. Enter a very peculiar surgeon named Sajac, who is obsessed with dog poop, his son, and E. B. White's children's books, Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web. These become the guiding texts for Patrick's slow acquisition of a soul, a process stimulated by a Green Bay Packers fanatic, Doris Clausen, who offers a deal: she'll give Patrick her dead husband's left hand if he'll give her a baby. This is classic Irving: extreme medical procedures, missing body parts, and a surfeit of sex. But his condemnation of the media for such excesses as the shameless orgy over the death of JFK Jr. is right-on, and for all its machismo and conflicted feelings about women, this is one crazy but sweet little love story. Donna Seaman