Alden Mudge

There is something different, something a tad experimental about John Irving’s newest novel, The Fourth Hand.

Yes, the book offers the familiar pleasures of any John Irving novel — a well-turned plot, an antic mixture of comedy and tragedy, and profound observations about the wounds and consolations of romantic and sexual love, to name just three.

But the feel of The Fourth Hand — its heft, its pacing — is noticeably different from previous John Irving novels. For one thing, it is only about half as long as earlier bestsellers such as A Widow for One Year or The World According to Garp.

"I don’t think The Fourth Hand is experimental in any modern sense," Irving said during a recent call to his home in Vermont. "It is still essentially a linear novel, and it relies on narrative momentum to move it ahead. But this is my 10th novel, and it is only the second novel that I’ve written without a childhood. I don’t give Patrick Wallingford or Mrs. Clausen a childhood. Those omissions were daunting to me. I always think that my feet are firmly on the ground as a novelist when I’m telling a whole life. It’s hard to imagine a novel without the effects of the passage of time. That is an experiment for me. I don’t allow more than five or six years of time to pass. So, yes, a major-minor character is missing, and that character is the passage of time."

It is an omission with a point, given the fact that Irving is both satirizing the lack of historical context in what currently passes for television news and examining the emptiness of the life of television journalist Patrick Wallingford.

In the breathtaking first chapter, Wallingford, while on assignment in India, loses his hand to a circus lion when he instinctively turns to record the lion’s roar and puts his hand too close to the cage. The footage of Wallingford’s tragedy is broadcast again and again to millions around the world, and Wallingford becomes famous as the "disaster man" and the "lion guy." His obsession with replacing his missing hand coincides with the obsession of Dr. Nicholas Zajac, a Massachusetts surgeon who wants to perform the first hand-replacement surgery in the U.S. Neither Wallingford nor Zajac counts on the complicating presence of Mrs. Otto Clausen, who donates her dead husband’s hand to Wallingford — and then demands the right to visit the hand. Wallingford’s emotionally difficult relationship with Mrs. Clausen moves him toward the transformation that is the ultimate point of the narrative.

"It mattered to me a great deal that Wallingford be extremely likable," Irving says. "I wanted him to be the kind of character that if you met him you couldn’t help liking him. Despite his, shall we say, moral insufficiencies, he’s not a bad guy. Yet there’s this sort of irritating superficiality about him."

Irving embodies Wallingford’s superficiality — and the superficiality of what the author refers to as "not-the-news network news" — in a sort of featureless urban landscape. "My novels generally have a lot of landscape detail, a lot of atmosphere," Irving says. "Here I tried to make everything like television itself. There’s a kind of sameness to everything. I consciously kept the opening chapters short and void of landscape, making the pace of the novel as quick as I could make it right up until Wallingford realizes that it’s not the hand that he’s missing, but an integral piece of his life, that he’s met her [Mrs. Clausen] and she’s gone away. From that moment on, not only do the chapters get longer, but the tone of the novel changes considerably."

From that moment on, Wallingford pursues Mrs. Clausen and grows increasingly discontented with his career as a television journalist. In the book and in conversation, Irving is sharply critical of television news. "How many times do we have to see Princess Di leaving the Ritz!" Irving exclaims at one point in our discussion. "It’s not even a good shot; it’s just the last one."

Wallingford’s rude awakening arrives when he chooses to hide out and not cover the biggest story of the moment — the John F. Kennedy Jr. plane crash. "I chose the Kennedy episode because there was nothing about him or his wife that bespoke a sought-after celebrity," Irving says. "He had it, but he never looked like he wanted it, so I felt that even in his death he was being violated. We all were. You walk away from the television set feeling disgusted with yourself that you have watched it again. Even at the end of four or five days, you’ve seen nothing new. You’ve heard nothing but vapid repetitions of homilies. It’s all repetitious stuff. It’s empty."

Contrast that with how Irving feels about reading. "I know a lot more about adultery from reading Madame Bovary than from hearing about all the myriad divorces of my friends, which is to say the details are just a little better. I’ve learned a lot from reading novels, not only about how I want to write or to tell stories, but most of what I know about so-called experience. Maybe books don’t get enough acknowledgement for their substitution in many people’s lives for personal experience. The fact that something happened to me is of less interest to me than how well the tale is told. Personal experience is not all it’s chalked up to be."

Little wonder then that books are part of the emotional currency of the characters in this and other Irving novels. Wallingford discovers, to his surprise, that Mrs. Clausen, who works in ticket sales for the Green Bay Packers, is reading The English Patient. He pursues her, ineptly, by trying to discuss the book with her.

In such well-observed details, The Fourth Hand finds its emotional force. In fact, The Fourth Hand demonstrates again just how good John Irving is at dramatizing the positive and negative charges of familial love, especially the love of a father for a child. "I can’t really separate being a writer from having children," Irving says. "I was an undergraduate when my eldest son was born. I was already a father with a young child when I was writing my first novel. When you’re writing a novel you must impose a kind of solitariness. But you can’t be alone with your thoughts without having your most pressing anxieties and concerns foremost in mind. If you have children, they are your most pressing anxiety and concern."

Irving says that he has begun working on a new novel, a longer novel, a narrative that begins from the point of view of a four-year-old. But he is not yet completely done with The Fourth Hand. Working with Lasse Hallstrom and Richard Gladstein (the same team that made the movie of The Cider House Rules, for which Irving won an Academy Award), Irving will write the screenplay adaptation of the book. "I’m excited at the possibility," Irving says at the end of our conversation. "The story has two elements that I think will make it a good movie — an immediate beginning and a good ending. If you’ve got that, you can’t go too far wrong."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

For the past 15 or so years, novelist Jonathan Franzen has been engaged in friendly literary competition with David Foster Wallace, whom Franzen describes as his "main rival and dear friend."

Five years ago, Wallace's magnificent novel Infinite Jest jolted Franzen like a kick in the pants. "Infinite Jest got me working, as competition will get you working," Franzen says during a call to his girlfriend's home in California's Santa Cruz Mountains, where he was visiting from New York.

At the same time that Wallace's novel was getting so much attention, Franzen was struggling to write a book called The Corrections—not, it turns out, the exhilarating masterpiece of one family falling apart that recently arrived on booksellers' shelves, but another book that was grander, or at least more grandiose, in conception. "The earlier book was much more about the stock market, insider trading and prisons. I finally found that the big social picture stuff wasn't working so well, whereas the little crises these characters were involved in interested me a lot."

Franzen had also recently published a lengthy, controversial essay in Harper's magazine lamenting the sorry state of contemporary literary fiction. For him, it signaled a departure from the high-concept, postmodern novels that had earned him wide critical acclaim (he was often called one of the four or five best American novelists under 40) but had appealed to a relatively small circle of readers.

"I found I was not so much turning away from but outgrowing or being done with writers like William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon who had so preoccupied me when I was young. And I was turning toward more conventional and accessible kinds of storytelling. For whatever reason there has come to be an increasing divide between a kind of highbrow, art fiction and really entertaining fiction that is accessible to a lot of people. I wanted to write a book that was both, that would satisfy the 'discerning avant-gardist' and would simply work at the level of story."

Franzen says the turning point, the moment when the old Corrections pointed toward the new, came when he wrote the "At Sea" section of the novel. "I wrote the cruise ship chapter to fit into the old version of the book. . . . I liked it so much more than anything else I'd written that I ended up throwing all the other stuff away and trying to build a different kind of book around it. Which I then, after a year of false starts, did."

In a novel in which every sentence counts, every page is alive and important, where the comic and tragic blend so seamlessly that they appear to be one and the same, and all five main characters—Alfred and Enid Lambert and their grown children Gary, Denise and Chip—embody the conflicting consciousnesses and the personal and social dramas of our era, it is impossible to choose a single section of the book as the most outstanding.

Yet the "At Sea" section is literally at the center of the book. In it, Alfred, a retired engineering department manager at a Midwestern railroad and a man of forbidding moral rectitude, reaches a critical point in his slow decline into Parkinson's-induced dementia. His wife Enid, a housewife who is a curious blend of virtuous self-sacrifice and steely control, has a crisis of her own. As the two interact with their fellow passengers and lurch toward private catastrophes, Franzen presents their lives in ways that are both chilling and hilarious.

"I don't trust a writer who is never funny," Franzen says, "and I take it as an unfailingly bad sign if a book I'm writing fails to achieve comedy early on. I think the comic is intimately connected with the tragic—both perspectives signal to me that the writer . . . can be trusted to put my interests as a reader ahead of the interests of the characters. I would no sooner fall in love with a humorless book than with a humorless woman."

"Much of what I throw away, as a writer, consists of uncomic scenes and passages. It's not until I laugh at what I'm writing that I know I'm on the right track. It doesn't always come easily, but I don't feel safe to be serious, either as a reader or as a writer, until I know there's going to be some lightness in the book."

But in The Corrections, at least, it is a particular, perhaps alternative kind of lightness that Franzen generates. "This is a personal growth-focused culture," Franzen says. "We're all constantly trying to correct ourselves, particularly my generation, which wants to correct a lot of mistakes we felt our parents made. For me, informing the book as a whole was a sense that, yes, that's a good thing to do, but you fix one thing and you break something else. You gain on one front and you lose on another. I don't think anybody wants a marriage like Alfred's and Enid's. At the same time, some of what Alfred stands for and some of what Enid stands for are things that the culture really feels the loss of."

This emotionally and morally nuanced response to American middle-class culture is part of what makes The Corrections such an exciting and deeply satisfying book to read. But Franzen still professes some surprise that so many early readers are responding so favorably to the book.

"When I was writing The Corrections, I was ashamed to be dealing with such mundane, emotionally exposed little things rather than some grand, 'important' story. We live in such a cool-conscious and hip-conscious culture that it's very hard to say any of those icky, shameful, personal things. I felt that I was putting down this weirdness in me and that I was going to be horribly exposed, that everybody was going to laugh and say, 'What's happened to Franzen? He used to do these interesting books about big themes and now he's given us this weird I don't know what.'"

Of course, just the opposite is happening. For very good reasons, The Corrections created a literary stir even before it arrived in bookstores. Franzen calls the acclaim "disorienting and weird." And also very gratifying. "It's been hard walking around for the last few years thinking, I know what kind of writer I am, but nobody else seems to know." Now, of course, the whole world will know.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Among the many pleasures of Julia Glass' marvelous first novel, Three Junes, are the numerous small, brilliantly rendered moments—the gestures, objects and places that suggest the larger dramas in the lives of the McLeod family. Such casual-seeming moments often have a painterly luminescence, which should surprise no one. Before she became a writer, Julia Glass was an accomplished figurative painter.

"Like the character Fern, I actually did have a fellowship to paint in Paris after I graduated from Yale," Glass says during a recent call to her home in New York's West Village. "I had always been a good writer, but I was concentrating on the visual arts. After college and after Paris, I came to New York like lots of young aspiring artists. I showed paintings in group shows and won some modest prizes. I supported myself as a copy editor for a magazine. Gradually I realized that I missed writing and I began to write stories. The funny thing is, I'd feel incredibly guilty about this. I'd come home from my copy-editing job and instead of working on some big painting, I'd feel drawn to working on a short story. It was as if I had some secret vice. Finally I decided, this is my life. I can do this if I want."

One of the first stories Glass wrote was "Souvenirs," which was loosely based on experiences she had on vacation in Greece in 1979 during her fellowship year. "It was a very formulaic, ingenue-abroad, loss-of-innocence story," she now says. It was never published.

Revisiting the story some years later, a "splinter of memory" of a "very sad-looking, very handsome older Englishman in his 60s" presented itself. " I had had only one brief conversation with him in which he explained that his wife had recently died. When I went back to the story, I thought this man is the really interesting character here." Since she knew almost nothing about England but did know something about Scotland (she'd vacationed with distant cousins in Dumfries during her teens), Glass made the story's central character, Paul McLeod, a Scottish newspaper publisher. The heroine of the original story morphed into Fern, a young artist who briefly tantalizes the grieving McLeod in Greece (and reappears in full in the final section of the novel). "Souvenirs" became "Collies," winner of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society medal for best novella, and, eventually, the opening section of Three Junes.

Told in three parts, each set in the month of June, each a variegated weave of past and present, the novel movingly explores love and loss and the emotional bonds among the McLeods Paul and Maureen, oldest son Fenno, twin sons David and Dennis, and a surprisingly large constellation of people connected to them.

"It's a novel about many things," Glass says. "Relationships between adult siblings fascinate me. . . . I wanted there to be a reflection of the truism that every child in a given family has a different childhood. But I also really wanted it to be about how we live past heartbreak, heartbreak that we're never going to get over, heartbreak that will be stratified in our hearts forever. For each of these characters there is a loss that is in a way irredeemable, but also one that he or she can get through and live beyond in a full way."

Central to this overarching story of heartbreak and its aftermath is the narrative of Fenno McLeod, an articulate, emotionally reserved gay man who goes to New York to study literature and stays to open a bookstore in the West Village. Fenno forms an extraordinary friendship with a witty, acerbic music critic named Malachy Burns who is dying of AIDS.

"Fenno was the kind of character I'd read about but had never experienced before, where a character gets up and starts to live his or her life pretty autonomously, while you're madly trying to keep up," Glass says. "I'd walk my at-that-time one-year-old along Bank Street to his babysitter, and I'd have this experience where I just sort of saw Fenno's life in this part of New York. Then on these walks back and forth with my baby in the stroller, I began to hear his voice, and I started to write part two of the book."

Glass also remained interested in the character of Fern, and she eventually began writing a third section to the novel. "Not having gone to school in fiction-writing, I probably broke a lot of rules without even knowing it," she says. "I never took a creative writing class, and I actually took very few literature classes, considering how much I love reading. I've been a bookworm since the minute I could read. But I love to savor books, read them very slowly. It drove me nuts that you have to take these courses where you read the great books in a week. I can't read that way."

Glass thinks of her novel as triptych rather than a trilogy, similar in form to "the altar pieces that I loved so much when I was studying art. You'd have a momentous central religious image and, to either side, images of the patrons who paid for the altar piece facing in toward this rich, very complicated, colorful central image. . . . I think of this as being Fenno's story flanked by the stories of these two other characters' stories seen in profile."

Of the novel's final section, in which Fern connects with Fenno, and Fenno revises his relationship with his brother Dennis, Glass says, "Early on while I was working on Three Junes I had a series of personal crises in my own life that could have paralyzed me. I reached a point where I realized that time doesn't heal all wounds, that there are tragedies that we carry around forever. But I am essentially a hopeful person. I didn't want it to seem glib or pasted on, but I did want this book to have a happy ending, and in my mind it does."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

From the cabin where he wrote the 10 remarkable short stories collected in The Hermit's Story, Rick Bass has a view of "a vibrant, bug-and-bird-seething marsh." The cabin "is cluttered," he admits. "I can write or I can file. I choose to write." Bass writes his stories in notebooks in longhand and hires a typist to prepare his manuscripts for publication. So it's not a problem that his cabin has no modern conveniences, only a woodstove.

From the house nearby where he takes my phone call, Bass sees "soft unbroken hills of mixed conifers—larch, fir, cedar, spruce, pine, hemlock." This is Bass' piece of the remote Yaak Valley of Montana, "a wild place, where nothing has gone extinct since the Ice Age," he says. Bass lives here with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes, and his two young daughters. His nearest neighbor is about a mile away. He must drive an hour to reach a town of any significant size. His daughters go to a two-room schoolhouse 15 minutes away. Bass, who was trained in geology and wildlife sciences, volunteers at the school, giving lessons in geology and writing and leading field trips. He comes home and writes to citizens and senators, urging them to help preserve these last roadless, wild places in America.

The physical distance between Bass' writing cabin and his house is not great, but the psychological distance can sometimes be huge. There is his Art. And then there is his Activism.

For example, later in the morning after this interview, Bass plans to lead a field trip in the Yaak Valley for the Forest Service. This is just one of the many fronts in the battle he and his preservation colleagues are waging this year. "Our contention," he says with unwavering intensity, "is that we just have these little crumbs of gardens where roads haven't yet been built now, so let's don't build into those last little places." He adds, "I can promise as a scientist and an activist that if we are not successful, we will be losing great American species that are part of our culture. In addition to being ecological treasures, these wilderness areas are also pretty much the anchors for much of the West's water supply and for the maintenance of the quality of that water supply."

For much of the last decade, Bass has used his art—his great skills and talents as a writer—to help his activism. His essays on natural history and the environment are some of the most eloquent pieces of nonfiction writing in recent memory. For most of that period, Bass convinced himself that his art and his activism were complementary. Now he's not so sure.

"Activism is war," he says, "and you can make some fine stories and even a fine novel out of war. But you can't do that for life. Instead of nurturing and developing the empathetic worldview necessary for good fiction, you train yourself in the other direction. And then there is the element of time. I'm putting in eight hours a day easy on the computer or in lobbying, educating and running different organizations. And then there's family time that's just so precious that I'm not going to let anything get in the way of it. That means that fiction takes a back seat to family and activism. The good news is that I've got a chance to effect change, permanent change on a landscape. I'd be a fool to complain."

Still, the conflicting claims on Bass' life make the current collection of short stories all the more remarkable. According to Bass, good fiction must have an almost physical impact on the senses. "Writers are guilty of overanalyzing or delighting in the technical part of a great story in the same way that a chef eating a great meal delights in knowing all the flavors and marveling at the way they all work together. But ultimately what makes a great story for the reader is the physical and emotional reactions it produces. It's that simple and that complex."

By that measure, the narratives in The Hermit's Story make for a very satisfying meal. Bass writes movingly and entertainingly about the spontaneous processes of life. In the story "The Cave," for example, in which a young man and woman enter a narrow abandoned mine shaft and eventually emerge naked into a new world, the delight is not just in the mystery and metaphor of the story but in the detailed, claustrophobia-inducing description of the dark mine shaft and the exhilarating, fully imagined ride the couple takes on an old, rust-locked pumpjack boxcar.

In the story "The Distance," Bass' protagonist both celebrates and tellingly critiques the sensibility behind Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. In the shrewd, Poe-like story, "The Prisoners," three men setting out on an early morning fishing trip discover the boundaries of the emotional prisons they've constructed for themselves. And in the marvelous title story, a woman, an old man and his dogs, lost in a snowstorm, fall through the ice into a dry lakebed and travel through a magical landscape of worldly wonders.

Linking almost all these stories is the abiding presence of wilderness. Bass, who says he's "someone who cherishes time alone and is not that excited about spending time amongst people," is most assuredly not an urban writer. Yet he seems almost nonplussed by how powerful and evocative his descriptions of the natural world can be. "The rural settings are important to mood, to the canvas, to color and pigment of the story," he says matter-of-factly, "but they are unavoidably the background to the characters' lives, just accurate rural white noise."

About balance, or stability, however, Bass is more specific. It's a central concern in his personal life and a recurring motif in his writing. "What many people mean by balance is safety or security," he says, "but they are not the same thing." What Bass means by balance has to do with "amplitude"—space—and movement. "The left and right, response and counter-response of movement and desire, of focus and unknowingness, is a pattern I've seen in humans and animals and even the sheer physical patterns of meandering rivers," he says. "What's required for balance or stability is space to have those amplitudes of left and right. It's a requisite of most threatened and endangered species, it's a requisite of humans' emotional lives, and that left-right motion, that movement, is the precise thing that gives a story life."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.