Sex and the Novel
LONG, MICHAEL
Sex and the Novel The world according to John Irving. BY MICHAEL LONG The dissonance of a John Irving novel—the typically staid John Irving prose used to express the typically steamy John Irving...
...It's like listening to a schoolmarm reading aloud the letters to Penthouse...
...One wishes to ask him how seriously we are supposed to take a book in which even the most mature characters possess the sexual sophistication of a high-school boy on prom night...
...Constantly...
...If your definition of a good book is a book about sex, then Irving is the place to go, because does this guy ever write about sex...
...For John Irv-ing's characters, sex is the sect, and no one is devout...
...Intensely...
...But in The Fourth Hand, Irving's characters engage in sexual distraction and even procreation with all the forethought and consequence of people choosing a candy bar in the checkout line...
...You can get a hint from the dust jacket...
...Lots of ideas pop up in the book: a search for identity, the virtues of maturity, the joy of being in love, how much fun it might be to have a nude housekeeper...
...BY MICHAEL LONG The dissonance of a John Irving novel—the typically staid John Irving prose used to express the typically steamy John Irving topics—can be overwhelming...
...But none is sustained...
...Surely that deranged woman would act deranged in a few other situations...
...they were the forces we didn't have the faith to feel, they were the forces we failed to believe in—and they were also lifting up Owen Meany, taking him out of our hands...
...And meanwhile, any touch of reality seems to have faded...
...Prodigiously...
...Even the PR flak couldn't figure the book out: "The Fourth Hand asks an interesting question: 'How can anyone identify a dream of the future?' The answer: 'Destiny is not imaginable, except in dreams or to those in love.'" This is on the order of asking how to cook a pot roast and answering by performing a Brazilian folk dance...
...Patrick Wallingford, a roguish and immature television reporter whose stories are of the National Enquirer bent, has his hand bitten off by a lion...
...Now I know they were the forces that contributed to our illusion...
...I shall keep asking you...
...They are only riffs on material he's shown us before...
...Callous as that is of Wallingford, what kind of widow—what kind of woman—is so desperate to get pregnant, and so unmoved by grief, that she rapes a stranger for his fatherhood potential within hours of the death of her dedicated husband...
...they believe their meeting is destiny...
...In The Fourth Hand, love arrives first, always, and only as sexual attraction...
...O God— please give him back...
...It wasn't always this way...
...For Irving's characters, sex is a sacrament...
...His stock characters are trotted out—mystical physicians, circus people, seductresses, afflicted animals, poop-hurling joggers, baby-obsessed single women—but without a theme or plot that significantly connects them...
...Like many contemporary storytellers, John Irving has lately attempted to gain intellectual credibility by being willfully obscure...
...And consider the heartbreaking ending of A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989): "We did not realize that there were forces beyond our play...
...And when the transplant surgeon hires a live-in housekeeper, she falls in love with him and parades her nubile self around the house naked to get his attention...
...At the same time, a woman in Wisconsin— the woman of his dream—offers her husband's body for transplant replacement parts, should an early death befall him, which it soon does...
...But he also returns the cast of crazies to the stage without attaching a clear statement of what their actions mean, and that proves deadly...
...The World According to Garp (1978) ends, "We are all terminal cases...
...she waits around for him...
...As it turns out, his characters pursue sexual gratification with a peculiarly modern devotion...
...If Irving had used a lighter touch, the book might have been a sex farce, like his 1972 novel The Water-Method Man...
...Not once do two people meet, discover common interests, or flirt...
...Religious-ly—especially religiously...
...Irving's novels are a parade of cross-dressers, kink freaks, transsexuals, obsessives, adulterers, and romanticizers of incest—with fantasists, fetishists, emotional nomads, and intellectual onanists...
...For instance, in Wallingford's dream, his fantasy lover has a voice so provocative that it spontaneously arouses any man who hears it...
...But every moment in The Fourth Hand is rendered in tones so earnest, it's clear Irving intends this as A Serious Piece of Literature...
...And it's worth noticing that the dust jacket quote is lifted verbatim from Irving's text...
...Michael Long is a director at the White House Writers Group, a strategy and public-relations firm in Washington, D.C...
...He tries to become worthy of the dream girl...
...He returned to form a little in 1998 with A Widow for One Year, reining in the usual Irving menagerie for a rich, if glacially paced, story...
...In The Fourth Hand, no one worries about their sexual encounters' possibility of disease or unwanted pregnancy—or what their sex lives might reveal about their lives the rest of the time...
...Continuously...
...They rut as rite...
...Wallingford impregnates a freshly minted Midwestern widow in a doctor's office...
...It is the gateway to other awareness, other possibility, other consciousness...
...That's a pity, because John Irving is a genuine stylist...
...it is what acquaintances of the opposite sex do just after exchanging names...
...The Fourth Hand, Irving's tenth novel, is another exercise in sharply rendered prurience as the driving force of life...
...Yet after A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving abandoned these little summaries, joining the club of seriously obscure authors in 1994 with A Son of the Circus, a mess set in India...
...And now, in The Fourth Hand, he trims the focus even more to personal stories and internal conflict...
...In The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), Irving recasts the conclusion of F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: "But this is what we do: We dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them...
...The reporter and the widow are irresistibly drawn to each other...
...And in an unrelated plot—it's more of an extended anecdote, really—the lonely, brainy transplant surgeon who performs the operation finds love, too...
...John Irving has always been the voice of the libidinous male fantasy, but it seems to have thinned down over the years into nothing except libidinous male fantasy...
...The Fourth Hand might have had more of those moments—if only he dropped his pretense of obscurity and sat down to think about what reality must be like for his hot-and-bothered characters...
...Just after the accident, he dreams a detailed vision of a love affair...
...For instance, an early scene in a doctor's office seems a deliberate echo of the encounter between Jenny Fields and the coma patient in The World According to Garp...
...The hand changes owners...
...They go to sex the way a lot of Americans seem to go to church—as a reflexive act, engaged in with little thought, but imagined to be good for the children...
...In his best moments, he can make crazy situations believable and inspiring, and his writing can show grace and clarity...
Vol. 6 • August 2001 • No. 45
