Rating: 
Summary: Stop After You Read "A Widow for One Year"
Review: If only John Irving had hung up his pen after he wrote "A Widow for One Year." Irving claims this book attempts to answer a question about dreams - how do you know when you've had a dream of the future? My question for him is: "Why do people - writers, (Irving, Heller) sports figures, Michael Jordan, etc., find it so difficult to quit while they're on top?" A Widow for One Year was everything this book is not: interesting, full of well developed characters, witty, different. This book never explores the motivations of anyone, except in the most shallow, obvious manner.
My advice to anyone who's read Hotel New Hampshire, The World According to Garp and AWFOY is to stop there, and don't read this book.
Rating: 
Summary: man loses hand, gains a soul
Review: This is not John Irving's best by a long shot, but it is still a good read. He seems to have borrowed heavily from his past novels: The World According to Garp (woman has sex with man once in order to get pregnant; loss of body part); "A Prayer for Owen Meany" (loss of body part); "A Widow of One Year"(relationship with employee) -- but he somehow lacks the literary brilliance he demonstrated in these earlier books. Those books had heart, this one is missing more than a character's hand.However, if you DON'T compare the book to what you know Mr. Irving can do, it is a wild and entertaining read, where a noted TV journalist loses his left hand to a lion and is the recipient of a donor hand 5 years later provided the widow have visitation rights. If you want to read something new and different, this is for you. But if you are an Irving fan, try not to be too disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: Not the best, but still a good buy
Review: The Fourth Hand is certainly not John Irving's best effort, and if you have never read his work start with Garp or Owen Meany, because this should not be your first impression of his work, but it is not as bad as most of the reviewers have made it. I will grant that the characters are not particularly well developed and you don't really care about any one, especially the women who all seem to be made from the same mold, but otherwise it is well done. The plot is interesting, the writing is superb, it is a very fast-paced read, and in the end the reader is left with a warm heart. The comic element is as prevalent as in any of Irving's book and it it incorproates many contemporary events which makes it all the more immediate to readers, so I do not agree with many reviers that it is not interesting enough for them. I think this is a great book for any one who has experience with Irving, loves good fiction, and is looking for a fun, relatively easy read.
Rating: 
Summary: I liked it.
Review: You either like it, or you don't. I did.
Rating: 
Summary: Deal Me Out
Review: "The Fourth Hand" is a serio-comic novel about a TV journalist who has his left-hand chewed off by a lion, but as far as the book's literary merits are concerned, it may as well have been author John Irving's writing hand. Irving's novel is so unimpressive, befuddled, inchoate and ultimately instantly forgettable, that one could hardly believe it was penned by the same author that brought forth such literary joys as "The World According to Garp", "The Hotel New Hampshire" and "The Cider House Rules". Patrick Wallingford is a correspondent for a 24-hour news outlet known pejoratively as the "disaster network" because of its overriding interest in sensationalist, if-it-bleeds-it-leads info-tainment. He loses his left hand when he unwisely sticks his microphone into a hungry lion's cage while covering the story of an acrobat's death in an Indian circus. What we also learn about the hapless journalist is that he is wildly successful with women -not that he aggreesively pursues them- but because they find the combination of his unassuming good looks and passivity irresistible. An idiosyncratic Boston hand surgeon, Nathaniel Zajac also finds Wallingford desirable for another reasons: he hopes to achieve fame by making him the recipient of the world's first successful hand transplant. Enter Doris Clausen of Green Bay, Wisconsin, a die-hard Packers fan, who for some puzzling reason gets her husband, Otto, to agree to donate his hand for the operation, in the evnt of his timely demise. Irving then contrives to have Otto accidentally shoot himself to death.Braely before his hand is cold, Doris seizes on the opportunity to get it to Dr. Zajak, and simultaneously use Wallingford to fulfill her burning desire to become pregnant. Poor late hubby Otto apparently was firing blanks. Added to this hash is an attractive,treacherously ambitious female colleague of Wallingford who also wants to bear his child, in addition to an older woman, a feminist, whom Wallingford has a torrid affair with while in Japan to address a Women's Conference. For some reason,that Irving never makes really clear, this brief interlude influences Wallingford to change his errant ways. Oh, and lest we forget there's the female professor of literature Wallingford meets in Boston, after which the pair read to one another E.B.White's "Stuart Little" and "Charlotte's Web" while lying naked in a hotel bed without having sex. Somehow this all leads to Wallingford's determination to set his life straight and settle down with Doris Clausen with whom he has fallen in love and who has indeed borne his child, Otto Jr. There is also an intriguing episode concerning a strange pain-killer Wallingford is given in India after his accident whch causes him to have sexually exciting, prescient dreams about his future life with Doris, but, like much else in this farrago of a novel,the phenomenon goes unpursued, unexplained and seems merely gratuitous. Heaven knows what Irving was intending to say with "The Fourth Hand" - maybe a commentary about the voyeuristic, scavangering contemporary news media? Possibly, the muddled condition of modern male-female relationships? A commentary on the potentially dangerous and harmful effects of unexamined medical science adventurism? Irving's novel is such a disjointed mess that, though it seems to be trying to be about all these things, ultimately it winds up being much do about nothing.
Rating:
Summary: Bizarre characers and newsworthy comments...
Review: Of the books I've read recently it was one I found easy to read, a page turner, in fact. A long (over 300 pages) short story, which I found very amusing and entertaining. A handsome, young journalist had his hand bitten off by a lion in India, the video of which shown all over the USA made Patrick Wallingford a handicapped celebrity. Hand transplants, romance, football, sex, news events, and happy endings abound in this new "What if..." by one of my favorite authors. If you like Irving when he's displaying his creativity comically you'll love this.
Rating:
Summary: a bad read
Review: This book had nothing in it for me. The characters were all wacky with no redeeming qualities. It made for a five minute discussion at our book club meeting. Luckily, the hostess had made a salmon mousse in the shape of a hand - now that was something to talk about!
Rating:
Summary: Such a disappointment.
Review: Because I love the other Irving books, I had high expectations and when this one disappointed, it disappointed big time. The book starts out well enough. The first few chapters fly by, with Irving writing his usual quirky, merry background to each major character. The feces-lacrosse game played by the doctor is an example of Irving at his best: outlining funny, personal habits that give insight into each character. However, these first few chapters, as you meet each character, are the only readable parts of the book. Once they all converge into each other's lives, the story quickly go downhill. There are so many unbelievable instances, especially in the last quarter of the book. I don't want to give anything away, but almost every "love" scene is written preposterously: I was left scratching my head multiple times, wondering "why did the character do that?" The attraction between the characters is not fleshed out enough to become believable. Even worse, the actions of character contradicts a lot of what was written in the beginning of the book. Sure, there is supposed to be "character development" but as a reader, the development part is missing. The story goes from Point A to Point B without showing the real path. There are many other good books to read out there. Don't waste your time with this one. Instead, pick up one of Irvings' other books (like Garp or Owen Meany) where the magic of his writing and story telling really pull things together. I give the book 1 star, because only the first few chapters are worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: A Sad Disappointment
Review: For over 20 years I've been a loyal supporter of John Irving's ideas, and the quirky characters he creates to support them. I read The Fourth Hand to the very last page, and with each page i read, I was not only sadly disappointed, but angry. I wanted to call John on the phone and ask him, "What the hell's the matter with you?" I've read my last Irving novel. The love affair I had with the man and his books is over. Characters flat, story banal, nothing else to say.
Rating:
Summary: Not his best, but entertaining enough
Review: This is clearly not John Irving's best book--I'd recommend Ciderhouse Rules or Garp instead--but it was engaging enough to keep my interest. The premise is somewhat interesting, if a bit hokey. The characters may be complex, but I wouldn't say they're realistic. The main character, Patrick Wallingford, seems socially inept, superficial, and dim-witted, but apparently he's meant to convey a profound(?) theme, which is a bit hard to pull off. The other characters are quirky, but hard to believe. And I'm not sure exactly how one is to perceive the ending of this thing. It ends happily, at least on the surface, but it's hard to believe that it's going to work out.
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