Or is not real but is tedious either way.
On the defect side, there are touches of awkward mysticism: a stolidly foreshadowing dream and a character who is ''The Fourth Hand'' shares many of the author's previous qualities and defects it also introduces some new ones. His novels are picaresque parades, with theatrical and ultimately cheerful Grand Guignol episodes, plenty of sex (less gymnastic than imaginatively sensual), clowns (parti-colored jeering Harlequin and white-silked moony Pierrot), jerky interruptionsĪnd side trips and too much of the parade master's explanations and policing. There is no mistaking an Irving novel, though it's hard to say what such a thing might be other than a good-sized detonation that leaves a relatively shallow crater. Is to compare him to himself: apples and oranges (winey, sweet, mushy, dry) in one sack, along with a dusting of gunpowder, a trickle of treacle and a bear or two (a lion in this new book). O compare one writer with another runs the apples-and-oranges risk: measuring incommensurables by the same ruler. In John Irving's new novel, life takes some unusual turns for a careless television reporter.
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