But what if the donor’s widow demands visitation rights with the hand? In answering this unexpected question, John Irving has written a novel that is by turns brilliantly comic and emotionally moving, offering a penetrating look at the power of second chances and the will to change. In Boston, a renowned surgeon eagerly awaits the opportunity to perform the nation’s first hand transplant. (July 10)įorecast: An arresting cover, 300,000 first printing and Irving's perennial popularity will launch this book, a BOMC main selection, onto the charts with brio.While reporting a story from India, New York journalist Patrick Wallingford inadvertently becomes his own headline when his left hand is eaten by a lion. 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. 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. 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 is not aiming for a grand statement in this novel, but something closer to the lovers-chasing-lovers structure of farce. Soon, in a sort of reversal of Taming of the Shrew, she is teaching the normally satyric Wallingford to domesticate his libido. Doris, desperate to get pregnant, has her own agenda. 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. It belonged to Otto Clausen, who willed it to Wallingford at wife Doris's instigation, and Doris wants visiting rights.
The hand comes with a strange condition, however. 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. While reporting on a trapeze artist who fell to his death in India (shades of Irving'sĪ Son of the Circus), handsome TV anchorman Patrick Wallingford experiences a freak accident-his left hand is chewed off by a lion. 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.
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