Update after the fact
Finished this book a couple of days ago. It only took about a week to read. This was partly because it’s the shortest novel Irving has written for twenty years. Sad to say, it was also partly because I was hungry for it to start… well, starting.
In a nutshell, the impetus for the story came from Irving’s wife. One night, watching a news story about a widow who donated her husband’s hand for transplant, she asked what would happen if the woman requested visiting rights with the hand.
All novels require a starting point, a catalyst to get them going. Here, unfortunately, Irving hasn’t really managed to get far beyond it. (And, to be frank, it wasn’t even a very good idea, was it? I mean, does it read like a great idea – or just a silly one?)
This is unlike Irving, whose trademark has been to take stories with small beginnings and have them mushroom into vast, slightly quirky social epics that span generations. It is as if he didn’t know where to go with this one.
His principal character is Patrick Wallingford, a handsome TV news journalist whose hand is eaten by a lion in a zoo mishap. Then there is Doris Clausen, a quiet country wife whose husband accidentally shoots himself before he can fulfil her wish and make her pregnant. Patrick receives the husband’s hand, then fills the role that the latter did not, then devotes himself to winning the widow.
But Patrick is a far cry from Irving’s best creations. His sudden conversion from amoral, spiritually bereft, bovine docility to ambitious romantic hero-on- a-quest is hard to swallow – especially as it stems from nothing more than the odd way that Doris undresses. Also – and this is really unlike Irving – there is almost no insight into what motivates Doris to do the things she does. Throughout the book, she remains an unknown quantity, difficult to engage on any level. All we really know about her is that she has the Siren-like ability to make her voice sound irresistibly sexy. Hardly great characterisation.
More crucially, it is the nature of the story that disappoints. In the past, Irving has shown to great effect how coincidence, real-life oddity, and sheer dumb luck can affect people in profoundly life-altering ways. In accidents, they perceive the hand of God, or forces of Nature, or the ghosts of their ancestors at work, and make decisions – choose important paths – which lead to ruin or success. Sometimes, just to confound the reader, it turns out that fate might have played a hand after all. Always, the outcomes are unexpected. Plans go awry. Weird stuff happens to normal folks. Or vice versa. Here, however, not much happens at all – let alone anything unexpected. Furthermore, Irving makes the mistake of turning his "fate is really luck" formula on its head, and, apart from being a cop-out, it just doesn’t ring true.
On the plus side, it is as well written as all of Irving’s work. (Actually, Irving usually describes himself as a re-writer; he bangs out okay material, leaves it, then goes back and re-writes it many times until it becomes better material.) There are some good comedy moments – mostly in the spirit of bedroom farce – and it reads quickly. Although the lead duo are unconvincing, the supporting characters are powerfully realised, particularly Nick Zajac, the gifted but peculiar transplant surgeon who first brings Patrick and Doris together. There is also Angie, a sexy make-up artist who works at Patrick’s company. Her extrovert "bimbo-ness" and uncomplicated sense of self, initially quite stereotypical, become more realistic and more endearing as more parts of her odd life make their way into the story. She is perhaps the most likeable character, too: level-headed, unencumbered by psychological guilt, able to act unethically but give salient moral advice.
Sadly, all in all, an unsatisfying book. If this were a report card, it’d say, "Must try harder, John".
Tobytook
