Most importantly, I always have to know the ending, and to feel it is emotionally moving enough to merit telling the story in the first place.”Įmotional response from readers, Irving says, is what he strives for as a writer. I only want to think of the sentence I’m writing and the next one.”Ĭertain points in any book’s outline - two wedding rings nailed under a boat dock in The Fourth Hand, for instance - serve Irving “as beacons, little lighthouses out there that let me know where I am. “Once I commit myself, I want it to seem, while I’m working, as though I’m remembering the story instead of making it up as I go along. “I may spend as much as 18 months just making an outline, a street map of the story,” he says. Like all Irving books and screenplays, it was crafted by its author in longhand. Forty-eight hours later, his other novel was postponed and work on The Fourth Hand had begun. In January 1999, he was working on another novel - “Struggling with it I knew a lot about the story, but there were elements missing” - when he and his wife saw a brief TV news item about a hand transplant. The Fourth Hand concept came along at a convenient time for Irving. I do a lot of creation of characters through childhood, but not here. “I learned, compacting 15 years of The Cider House Rules down to about two for the film, how to tell a story without my usual passage of time. “That’s very much because it’s written post-screenplay,” Irving notes. Longtime Irving readers will notice that, at 313 pages, The Fourth Hand is substantially shorter than Irving’s previous novels. And I like the theme that we are able to grow, even people who seem as incapable of change as Wallingford.”

“It’s more a comedy than anything I’ve written for a while, though my books always start out funnier than they end up. “The Fourth Hand was really a fun book for me,” Irving says, referring to the tale of Patrick Wallingford, a vacuous pretty-boy TV journalist who loses a hand but finds eventual emotional redemption. Sipping iced tea, Irving casually molds meatballs, grinds bread crumbs, concocts a complicated sauce and simmers everything together while still managing to focus on the conversation. Their home is gorgeous, light and spacious, and offers spectacular views of a valley and surrounding terrain. Irving, his wife, Janet, and their elementary-school-age son live on the side of a mountain outside a small Vermont town.

John irving the fourth hand review