Month: February 2007

In this his 13th novel, John Irving has not lost his touch (pun intended).  Once again he pursues a fantastic premise to its improbable conclusion, in this case the transplant of a hand and with it something of the personality of the diseased donor along with the transplanted affection of the donor’s wife.

But is this science fiction or an elaborate metaphor of how we seek to change ourselves by the example of others and how we seek in those we love some aspects of those we have lost.

The fourth hand is not the original two or the transplant, which eventually fails, but the stump, which comes to  serve adequately enough and to be lovable enough by two people who have matured enough.

This Sierra Club book published in 1989 is a hilarious unrelenting sendup of evils perpetrated by the Bureau of Land Management, the LA Department of Water and Power, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Forest Service, real estate developers and less organized landscape destroyers such as ATV riders and bumbling urbanite hunters and fishermen.  Embedded in the comic satire are depictions of awesome scenery and a wealth of geological/ecological information.  The author is Page Stegner, son of Wallace Stegner and a teacher of writing at the University of Arizona.