A Summary of John Irving’s ‘A Widow For One Year’ and ‘The Fourth Hand’

In A Widow for One Year. Ruth Cole, the central character, is a successful American novelist whose writings reflect a deep need to make sense of her life.

Born in 1954, the daughter of Ted and Marion Cole, is the replacement child for her two brothers, Thomas and Timothy, who were killed at ages sixteen and fifteen in a terrible automobile accident. Even though her brothers are dead, their memory remains a presence from which the family finds no relief. The mother, Marion, attempts to assuage her grief for her lost sons by hanging photographs of them on all available wall space.

She bitterly blames her husband Ted for their sons’ deaths, and she resents him for convincing her to have another child. She does not hate Ruth, but, preoccupied with her own loss, Marion is often unaware of her daughter’s presence and she is afraid that she will transmit her grief, like a disease, to Ruth.

Ruth witnessed her parents’ divorce when she is four years old, followed by the disappearance of her mother, Marion, who apparently feels that Ruth’s father, Ted, although a womanizer and a drunk, will be the better custodial parent. Ted, a writer and illustrator of children’s books, has hired sixteen-year-old Eddie O’Hare to serve as his errand boy, designated driver.

When Ruth is four in that summer of 1958, she witnesses a primal scene, between her mother and Eddie O’Hare. She never forgets it, though she forgets some of the details. Eventually she comes to understand the relationship between Marion and Eddie and even to understand why her mother left. Ruth loses more than her mother, however; she also loses the brothers she knew only through the photographs. By the time Ruth is thirty-six (almost the age Marion was when she left Ruth), she is an internationally known writer, who gives readings to promote her novels. At one of these readings in New York City, she meets Eddie O’Hare again.

Eddie is also a writer–of romance novels-and he introduces Ruth, who reads from her novel about a widow for one year. Ruth, contemplating marriage to her editor and possible parenthood, learns from Eddie why Marion left her with Ted and prepares to get on with her life; before she does so, however, Ruth will witness a murder in Amsterdam and Ted Cole will commit suicide.

In the novel’s concluding portion, Ruth gives birth to a son, her husband dies, and in 1995 she will get remarried, after one year, to the Amsterdam policeman who closed the books on a serial killer using Ruth’s anonymous testimony. Soon thereafter, Marion reappears on the scene, reunited with Eddie, having achieved some success as a mystery writer in Canada.

If someone adores A Widow for One Year, one may be a bit disappointed in The Fourth Hand. The main character of the story, handsome TV journalist Patrick Wallingford is obsessed with minutely described one-night stands.  He is filming a package about an Indian circus, The Gnesh, which is an Indian symbol of new beginnings when a lion eats his left hand. Meanwhile, a total stranger in Wisconsin, Doris Clausen and her husband Otto are obsessed with the Green Bay Packers and with having a child.

Mrs Clausen, sees a clip of it on TV, and writes to promise Wallingford her husband’s hand for transplant in the event of her spouse’s death. Doris cajoles Otto into willing his left hand to Patrick and her husband shoots himself dead on the night of the 1998 Super Bowl, and his hand is flown to Boston where a brilliant surgeon transplants it to Wallingford’s left forearm. With the hand comes the grieving widow, who has some interesting plans of her own for the lucky recipient. Mrs Clausen flies to meet Wallingford, whom she promptly seduces with an eye to childbearing.

Famous hand surgeon Nicholas Zajak is, for his part, obsessed with dog feces–also described in endless detail–which he scoops up with his old lacrosse stick and hurls at rowers on the Charles River. Zajak attaches Otto’s hand to Patrick, and Doris demands visitation rights with Otto’s hand, as well as with Patrick’s child-producing equipment. On her first meeting with Wallingford, they have sex, Wallingford recognizing Doris’s voice as one he heard in a vision in India while recovering from his accident.

Doris, desperate to get pregnant, has her own agenda. The pregnancy takes more successfully than the husband’s transplanted hand, which is eventually rejected. After a fritter of other affairs, Wallingford throws himself at Mrs Clausen and finds true love.

Bibliography

Irving, John. A Widow for One Year. New York: Random House, 1998

Irving, John. The Fourth Hand. New York: Random House, 2002