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A.
The Fourth Hand is my most comic novel since The Water Method
Man — I would agree — but I also believe that the contrast
between how comic the novel is, at the beginning, and how moving
it is, at the end, is very sharp. The last two chapters, in particular,
don’t have many laughs. Unlike Wallingford, Doris Clausen
is a serious person; Wallingford, eventually, becomes serious,
but he doesn’t start out that way.
A character like Zajac, whizzing dog turds with his lacrosse stick
at rowers in the Charles, doesn’t really “come from”
anyone; I don’t suffer what people call “inspiration.”
I was looking to make the super surgeon human, flawed; his eccentricities
are laughable to others. (Dr. Larch, in The Cider House Rules,
is an ether addict; not so funny, but that is Larch’s eccentricity
taken to an extreme, that is his flaw.)
At some level, most accomplished people are combative — even
if the enemy is only dogshit. And Zajac provides comic relief
to Mrs. Clausen, who is deadly serious, forever earnest.
Q. The Fourth Hand is a happy story, ultimately, even if there
are some more serious underlying themes. I’m left with the
impression that John Irving in 2001 is in a good frame of mind.
Is this an accurate observation?
A. I don’t think my “frame of mind” has much
of an influence on whether or not the novel I am writing is ultimately
a happy story. It takes years to write a book. You’re never
the same person at the end of it as you were when you began. In
the case of the film of The Cider House Rules, which took 13 years
to get made, I still had to be faithful to those characters and
their story.
I think I was never more unhappy, in my personal life, than when
I wrote The Water Method Man — my most cheerful book, and
the only novel with an unqualified happy ending. I was on the
upswing when I finished The 158-Pound Marriage, which is surely
my bleakest, most pessimistic novel.
It’s been a good couple of years for me. A Widow for One
Year was very successful. The Cider House Rules film won me and
Michael Caine Oscars; and, at 58, I have this second career as
a screenwriter. I’m happily married. My children are in good
shape. But this has little bearing on the vision a novelist or
screenwriter has on a story — the story gives you the vision.
The novel I am just beginning (at this most happy time in my life)
is perhaps my least happy story.
Q. Yet there is still a sad side to some of the characters
here, particularly Dr. Zajac who is mocked behind his back by
his colleagues, is victimized by his ex-wife, and suffers from
a peculiar neurosis where birds are concerned. He ends up in a
good way once Irma enters the picture, but he’s still kind
of a pathetic character when we meet him. You also have Patrick
“Disaster Man” Wallingford who is incredibly shallow,
yet gets all the women, despite the fact he is missing a hand.
He’s sort of an “anti-Zajac,” if you will, but
also pathetic in his own way. Both ultimately fall in love, Zajac
with Irma and Wallingford with Mrs. Clausen, and this changes
their lives forever. Are you saying that “love conquers all”?
A. I try to be true to life; it’s as simple as that.
Life has its ups and downs. I would never generalize (about a
novel, or a body of a novelist’s work) and say either that
love conquers all or that it doesn’t. These kinds of conclusions
are drawn from specific characters in a detailed story. Readers
draw their own conclusions; I just try to be faithful to who the
characters are and tell a good story.
I would not want to lose a hand. I would not want Patrick Wallingford’s
job. And if I lost a hand, I would never undergo hand-transplant
surgery. I tried to think of someone who would try it, and why.
In my personal case, I met the right woman — I have a happy
love story. It might not have worked out that way. I had a first
marriage that failed; I’ve been in bad relationships. I think
some people are luckier than others — especially in the love
department.
But I try not to generalize. Storytelling is the most specific
business I know; the best details are the most specific.
As a writer, I think I’m just more interested in stories
about people who succeed at something, and in characters who (after
many difficulties and failures) triumph, at least to some degree,
than I am interested in victims or in people who make nothing
of their lives. I am realistic as a writer, in terms of how human
beings behave, and in terms of the details of people’s lives,
but I wouldn’t say that so-called social realism matters
very much to me. I wouldn’t argue with the conventional social
realism that most people have disappointing lives, or that there
are more stories about losers than winners; I’m just not
interested in those lives, and in those people, as a writer.
Q. Speaking of Dr. Zajac, you feature doctors as characters
in many of your other books. I’m thinking of Dr. Larch, of
course, in The Cider House Rules, and Dr. Daruwalla, in A Son
of the Circus. What is it about doctors that interests you?
A. I like doctors. My grandfather was a doctor. I wanted to
be a doctor, but I didn’t have the kind of grades in the
science courses that would have got me into a good medical school.
I read a lot about medicine, and the history of medicine; it’s
an active interest. But, more germane to my fiction, people who
are in trouble need to see doctors. The circumstances of people
in trouble are generally a good place for any story to begin.
Dr. Larch is an interesting character in his own right, certainly,
but look at all the other interesting people with interesting
problems who have come to him and put themselves in his care.
Similar to Dr. Daruwalla — he gets to meet some people who
have interesting problems because he’s a doctor.
Q. There are returning character types in your novels. And
there are recurring places too. I’ve noticed India on several
occasions, in The Fourth Hand, where the book begins, and in A
Son of the Circus, where most of the book takes place. India is
a distant place for most of us, yet somehow you seem to know it
well. Is India an imaginary place for you where the weird and
fantastic occurs, where you can paint an exotic picture for your
readers?
A. People are vulnerable in foreign countries; they are unsure
of themselves, and their eyes are open a little wider. I used
Vienna and India to provoke that kind of noticing of details in
my characters — less than to discover or reveal anything
necessarily true about Vienna and India. I wouldn’t mind
if I never went to either place again.
But a setting has to be real, graphic, vivid. Any place where
the details are vivid is a good place for fiction.
Q. Maybe it’s a guy thing, but there’s often a sport
that’s featured in your books. In The World According to
Garp and elsewhere it’s wrestling. In The Fourth Hand it’s
football. What do the games people play — the contests —
mean for you?
A. Games … sports … well, wrestling was a huge part
of my life. I was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of
Fame in 1992; it was an important honor in my life, because of
how much of my life revolved around wrestling. I competed until
I was 34 and coached the sport until I was 47. But as a subject
to write about … well, I keep my distance.
The football in The Fourth Hand is Mrs. Clausen’s thing.
It represents a part of her life that Wallingford is unfamiliar
with. That’s a common difference among people — some
people are sports fans (they can’t help it); others couldn’t
care less (who can blame them?) It’s just an obstacle in
the way of Wallingford’s relationship with Mrs. Clausen.
I don’t think that The Fourth Hand is about football —
not even the chapter that takes place (largely) at a Green Bay
Packers game. I don’t think Garp was about wrestling.
My little memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, is about wrestling
— about the coincidence of writing and wrestling in my life.
But that’s really all it is: a coincidence.
When I won an Oscar for The Cider House Rules, certainly other
writers called to congratulate me — mostly close friends,
not many other writers. But I think every wrestler I ever knew,
and some I never knew, called or wrote me. That was weird.
Q. Would you like to see The Fourth Hand made into a movie?
In My Movie Business you expressed some of the frustrations of
getting your books made into movies, but can you see the new book
as a movie anyway? It seems very suited to the silver screen.
A. It seems inevitable that The Fourth Hand will be a movie.
As the shortest of my novels, for that reason alone it is the
easiest to adapt — and for other reasons, too. There is little
passage of time (always difficult in films); there are fewer main
or major–minor characters than in other of my novels; and
it’s a love story.
My collaboration with the Swedish director Lasse Hallström
and the producer Richard Gladstein made my working in The Cider
House Rules a pleasure. And the most gratifying outcome for that
film — how well it did at the box office and at the Academy
Awards — was largely after my writing My Movie Business.
That memoir was a lot more positive about my experience with Cider
House than I read in most reviews, which confused my other experiences
with film adaptations of my work with what happened to Cider House;
or, in the case of other reviews, the reviewers were simply unwilling
to listen to how generally pleased with the Cider House experience
I was. Some reviewers had a preconceived attitude about how I
should feel about the movies.
For someone whose principal creative enterprise is solitary (writing
novels), I love the occasional sea change of a collaboration —
provided I get along with my collaborators. In the case of Cider
House, I got along so well with Lasse Hallström and Richard
Gladstein that I know we will work together again.
Do I want to work with a different director, someone other than
Lasse? Not right now. A collaboration is also about timing, however.
Lasse is shooting a film this winter, then editing it for much
of the remainder of the year. I am trying to start a new novel
and trying to finish an original screenplay. But if the opportunity
is there for Lasse and Richard and me to make a film of The Fourth
Hand, we’ll do it.
There is also a film of A Widow For One Year in the works, but
not yet in production. A young writer-director came to me with
a fabulous idea for a script. I told him to try it. It’s
a very good script, and I am supporting it and him every way I
can. I won’t be the screenwriter for that one — it’s
already in good hands without me.
I never feel that a good novel is somehow incomplete if someone
doesn’t make a good film of it, nor do I feel — in each
case — possessive of my novels being turned into films. I
just think it’s possible, even likely, that Lasse Hallström
and Richard Gladstein and I will collaborate on a film of The
Fourth Hand, but if we don’t, someone else will do it. It’s
okay with me, either way. I have enough to do.
Q. In The Fourth Hand you comment on the state of television,
and to some extent the popular media. It’s almost pro forma
for literary types to bash the state of TV today, especially since
what the book represents is the antithesis of TV. But you have
fun with the absurdity of the Disaster Channel without going too
deeply into criticizing it. What do you think of TV in general?
Are you worried that the vacuous nature of television — if
you see it that way — is supplanting the importance of books
and reading in North America?
A. I don’t think that The Fourth Hand is a “bash”
of television in any serious sense. Wallingford is disappointed
in his job. Lots of people are, not all of them TV journalists.
I personally don’t turn to television for any serious information,
nor do I feel that TV threatens my readers or my movie audience.
People who watch a lot of TV like TV: let them. People who like
to read novels like novels. And then there are moviegoers.
I don’t feel that film and television (which are hugely different
from each other) are “supplanting the importance of books
and reading in North America,” as you say. These audiences
are distinct from one another. (There’s more overlapping
between novels and films than there is between television and
anything else.) It’s parents who have to be careful. Because
of the ease with which children absorb what’s on TV and movies
and video (or now, DVD), parents have to be more vigorous in encouraging
good reading habits in their children — and it’s parents
who have to put some limitation on how much (and what kind of)
TV and videos their kids see. If kids learn to read and are encouraged
to read, they will want to read when there’s something good
to read.
But I would stand by my portrait of the network Wallingford works
for. We’ve all seen that kind of television; and before we
die, we’ll all see much more of it.
Patrick Wallingford is a likeable character, despite his being
a television journalist. In fact, to most readers, he is a more
sympathetic character than either Garp or Ruth Cole, who were
both novelists.
Q. I have to ask about all the sex. Let’s face it, this
is a pretty sexy book. Some of us get to live vicariously through
Wallingford and his various conquests. There’s fornication
everywhere, women trying to get pregnant, voluptuous housekeepers,
babies being born. Your books have entertained this theme, and
The Fourth Hand doesn’t disappoint in this regard. The Washington
Post said about The 158-Pound Marriage that “Irving looks
cunningly beyond the eye-catching gyrations of the mating dance
to the morning-after implications.” Would that be one of
the messages in the new book?
A. People who don’t think about sex are dead — or
else they’re old enough to be largely indifferent to it,
personally; even then, thinking about sex is natural even if only
in memory. I became a teenager in the 1950s, when sex was largely
forbidden (among teenagers) but no less all-consuming in one’s
imagination. Sex frequently changes people’s lives; or else
the disappointment of it changes people’s lives in other
ways.
Generally, in my stories, people seem to pay disproportionately
for what sexual pleasure they manage to have. I don’t know
why that is — it’s just an observation. I think it’s
a pretty truthful one.
I think about sex all the time. Why not? But I don’t believe
it’s a very reliable subject for a conversation — people
rarely tell the truth about sex.
Q. The Fourth Hand is shorter than your recent novels. Was
that intentional?
A. Intentional, yes — everything is intentional. I knew
when I first thought of the novel that it would be shorter (by
half) than most of the others, but I didn’t design its length
— it was just a story with more focus and fewer complications
than most I have imagined; and the passage of time is less, as
I already mentioned; and there are fewer characters of importance
to the story (more focused in that way, too).
I would like to write shorter novels than I have a habit of doing,
more like The Fourth Hand or even shorter. Imagination is a function
of what you can remember. When you get older, your memory gets
weaker. You have to remember more (of what you’ve imagined)
when you write a long novel. It would therefore be smart of me
to write shorter novels, at my advanced age, but that doesn’t
necessarily mean I won’t imagine another long one. The one
I am trying to begin feels long to me – longer than The Fourth
Hand, anyway. I hope I’m wrong.
I will say without qualification that it is easier to write a
shorter book than a longer one. People who tell you different
probably haven’t written a longer one. Maybe writing screenplays
has helped me to envision shorter novels, but I don’t think
there’s anything preventing me from imagining a longer one;
I don’t know if I can help it.
You can revise or make a long book shorter — I always do
that. But you can’t unimagine something you’ve imagined.
If you envision something, it’s there — you’ll
never stop seeing it.
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