After two days of summer rain, the Green Mountains of Vermont look almost tropical. Mist smoulders on the forested slopes. Before ski vacations, before outlet shopping, these were the backwoods; today the more remote valleys still support marginal farms and sawmills. On this particular mountain road, however, discreet signs and steep driveways betray the presence of money. The general store in the nearby village sells $40 bottles of wine.
John Irving's house is built into this affluent hillside and its windows are filled with the Green Mountains. Cantilevered into mid-air, his office is one in which you could happily do nothing but stare. Irving, of course, writes. He writes a great deal. Best known for leviathans such as A Prayer for Owen Meany, A Widow for One Year and A Son of the Circus, he has now surprised even himself by producing what many reviewers praise as a novel of "reasonable length" - The Fourth Hand is a little over 300 pages long.
"When the publisher sent me the proofs I thought half of it was missing," Irving laughs. That's the other surprise: Irving laughs. Interviewers reportedly find him moody or distant, but today he is neither. Earlier in the hallway, however, there was a sense that things could go either way. This medium-sized block of a man - a former wrestler, wrestling coach and referee - seems to size up a stranger as he might an opponent. Arms flexed by his sides, eyes wary, he observed as his wife and agent Janet Turnbull, his assistant Kelly and his dog welcomed the visitor. Now, visibly relaxed, he leans back in his leather office chair, tossing a stone paperweight from hand to hand, and discusses his work with disarming modesty.
"It was a lot of fun to write a comedy with pace," he observes of The Fourth Hand, "but I had to learn how not to have detail everywhere. The whole point about Wallingford's life, after all, is that it's without detail." Patrick Wallingford, the novel's hero, is a handsome television reporter who suffers a bizarre amputation - by lion. "Imagine a young man on his way to a less than 30-second event - the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age," Irving writes, maintaining acceleration as he assembles a diverse cast of every men and eccentrics. There are the various women who seduce Wallingford; there is Dr Zajac, the neurotic Boston surgeon with hand-transplant ambitions: Zajac's lusty housekeeper, vicious ex-wife and distressed son. Above all, there is the supremely ordinary Doris Clausen, who donates her dead husband's hand to Wallingford on condition that she receive full visitation rights. She also wants to have his baby.
"Wallingford appears to be on a collision course with Zajac," Irving explains, "when in fact he's on a collision course with Mrs Clausen." The oblivious hero loses his hand but gradually learns to see, to pay attention.
Like much of Irving's fiction, The Fourth Hand is a novel of perception: "I try to show how crazy it is to be somewhere and not see it, to be with somebody and not get it." John Irving sees a novel, almost literally, often long before he writes it. Wallingford's accident, for example, is based on something the writer noticed following a trip to India. "I was there researching Son of the Circus and travelling with a film crew so I returned with 72 hours of footage. Every afternoon I watched it on my stationary bicycle - circuses, brothels, hospitals, dwarfism. Then one afternoon I noticed the sound man hearing the lions roaring behind him. Without looking, he automatically stretched the microphone closer to the cage, never realising that he was inches away from losing his arm." Wallingford pays for a similar gesture.
Irving is forthright about his visual research methods. His orderly, spacious office is dominated not by bookshelves but by a large television and VCR. Folders of photographs are stacked neatly beside his IBM Selectric typewriter. ("I have four Selectrics in this house, a few in Toronto. They're great.")
Before writing, Irving studies. In the case of Widow for One Year, for example, he spent time with prostitutes and police in Amsterdam (the book launch was held in the police station). For The Cider House Rules he witnessed births and abortions and consulted medical texts and the diaries of his grandfather, an eminent Boston obstetrician.
Getting the facts right is important but not the point. "There has to be an emotional purpose to a book, otherwise I'm not interested," Irving says, "that's why I always write the ending first. It might be the last line or the final scene. Once I've got that I've got the voice.
Then I just work my way back. In The Fourth Hand that moment is when Doris tells Wallingford 'Give me your hand'." A deft satire on television journalism, The Fourth Hand was, fittingly, inspired by a TV news story. "We were watching this item about a woman donating her late husband's hand to an amputee and Janet said to me: 'What if she demands visitation rights?' That was it. I couldn't sleep that night and in 48 hours I had the ending, I had everything."
Even as a teenager Irving seemed to know where he was going. Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, John Winslow Irving decided to become a writer when he was 14. His parents recommended his grandfather's books: "the clinical details of the early days of obstetrics and gynaecological surgery were frankly more eye-opening than anything in Charles Dickens," Irving writes in his memoir My Life in Movies, "although Dickens would ultimately prove to be a greater influence. " He published his first novel when he was 26. Ten years later, The World According to Garp made Irving's name and taught readers what to expect from him. In that novel, a group of women cut out their tongues in solidarity with a rape victim. In A Prayer for Owen Meany, one character saws off another's finger to save him from combat in Vietnam.
Dismemberment, incest, wild animals, excrement, cosmic jokes and lavatorial humour occur in his work: "If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?" Irving asks, adding that this does not make him a rebel. "I write 19th-century novels where a lot of rules apply: plot, development of character, the passage of time."
Outside literature, he values civil codes of behaviour and particularly likes the rule that holds a wrestler responsible, if he lifts his opponent off the mat, for the opponent's safe return.
Irving's non-sporting bouts are often less decorous. In July, 1998, the writer drew fire from much of Vermont when he publicly opposed legislation that required equity of tax funding in school districts statewide. Under the bill, Irving's town now shares its property tax revenue with over 200 poorer towns. "My response is as brutally upper class as I can make it," Irving protested at the time, "I'm not putting my child in an underfunded public school system." He declined to talk to the Vermont press, he added, "because I don't want to make my child a target of trailer-park envy". The remark prompted a member of the mobile home park project in Wilmington to respond: "I thought he knew the difference between character and setting." Time magazine christened him John "Meany" Irving, Tom Wolfe accuses him of "sputtering and foaming" and the leftist Nation magazine criticises his "fascination with gender". "That's great," Irving laughs, "writing about the difference between men and women is politically suspect. We're supposed to have gotten over that."
With a national book award, an Oscar, several other prizes and successful film adaptations to his credit, the writer is as unapologetic about his success as he is about his opinions. One wall of his office is covered with framed book jackets of his novels. Alongside that display are enlarged reproductions of two New York Times' best-seller pages listing Irving at number one.
There are also family pictures (Irving has three sons) and photographs taken on the set of The Cider House Rules, the 1999 film that launched Irving's collaboration with Swedish director Lasse Hallstr=F6m. Currently directing The Shipping News from Annie Proulx's novel, Hallstr=F6m will work on the film version of The Fourth Hand. A Son of the Circus may also go into production this year.
"Writing The Cider House Rules' screenplay taught me a lot," Irving recalls. "I knew I could keep The Fourth Hand shorter and tighter, that I could say everything about Wallingford's youth in the first few pages with a backhand gesture, very much like the establishing shot in a movie."
Denying Doris Clausen a childhood was harder for Irving. The novel's most complex character, she is also his most convincing female creation to date: a sublimely ordinary Midwesterner who works for the Green Bay Packers football team and whose past materialises before Wallingford's eyes as he contemplates the family snapshots in her lakeside cabin. "For the first time he sees a life as a collection of personal moments, something he's never had," Irving explains, "and that's one reason why the lakeside chapter works so well, because the book has been so bare until then."
An affecting love story, The Fourth Hand is also a merciless indictment of television journalism as practised on the "disaster channel" where Wallingford reports on tragedies that pass for news. "All the so-called news in the novel is real," Irving stresses: "the German who drives into a bridge while he's watching an eclipse, the Australian who dies in a drinking contest - all real." Television's non-stop coverage of John Kennedy's fatal plane crash triggers Wallingford's self-disgust and prepares him for Mrs Clausen's redemption. But Irving had any number of journalistic nadirs to choose from. "I was very tempted to go to Bosnia to make that part of Wallingford's professional frustration," he recalls, "but the timing didn't work. I had to place his transplant on the right side of the world's first real hand transplant, so the margins were quite narrow."
Just thinking about the American news business causes Irving's nostrils to flare. His New England drawl also lengthens noticeably when he observes that "most of the American public becomes bored with something, tired of something, before they really get it". Incidents of literary sloppiness provoke a similar response. "Malice in book reviews never irritates me as much as laziness does," he observes. "In many cases, the reviewer has either not read my book, has skimmed it, or has simply copied other reviews. I'm not kidding. I've seen factual errors - things like the wrong person dying - repeated verbatim in sequential reviews." Thomas Hardy, now there's a writer who handled reviewers, says Irving. "When they trashed Jude the Obscure, he just said 'Screw you' and wrote poetry for the rest of his life.
He knew how to be angry. I love Hardy."
The dismissive review of The Fourth Hand in the New York Times this month may gall Irving, but it won't drive him to verse. Returning to the novel he set aside to write The Fourth Hand, he is now immersed in tattoos and church-organ music. "Look at this," he says, leafing through a book called 1,000 Tattoos until he finds the broken-heart illustrations. "That's what the mother has tattooed under her arm, the divided heart and the inscription 'Until I Find You'."
It is also the title of the novel, which travels from Nova Scotia to Europe as a tattoo artist and her son look for the child's father, a church organist.
Irving has already visited the novel's locations and his notebooks are multiplying. "I write everything in longhand first," he says, proffering a small, bulging jotter and looking for a moment like an embarrassed schoolboy presenting his crushed insect collection, "and that's sort of it."
Pinned to the wall over the typewriter, a single page of typed script concludes with the words every writer craves: The End. For John Irving, however, it is just the beginning.