"The Fourth Hand," Irving's first novel since winning the Academy Award for the screenplay of "The Cider House Rules," is comparatively small. It is shorter than the others, certainly, but it also matters less. The instigating tragedy is comparatively minor: Beefcake newscaster Patrick Wallingford's left hand is eaten by an Indian circus lion. Patrick wants a new hand very badly, but his life goes on as before, anyhow: reporting on disasters for a third-rate news channel, sleeping with countless women thanks to his movie-star looks -- and never quite landing in the world. He is not a person of depth, and losing his hand does not make him one: "It had previously been Patrick's experience that women were easily smitten with him, at least initially; it had also been his experience that women got over him easily, too."

Patrick's studliness and essential shallowness differentiate "The Fourth Hand" from Irving's recent books -- and frankly, they make it worse. Irving protagonists are usually painfully sensitive, acutely aware of every nuance of interaction. They feel things more strongly than other people around them. Life tears them up, they take action, they are consumed by worry. They also tend to be sexually inhibited or dysfunctional: The narrator of "A Prayer for Owen Meany" is celibate, as is Dr. Larch of "Cider House"; the hero of "Hotel New Hampshire" is erotically obsessed with his sister; Dr. Daruwalla of "Son of the Circus" is just a prude. "The Fourth Hand," by contrast, traces the emotional maturation of a discontented lothario -- and in this sense, it's more similar to the early novel "The Water Method Man" than to Irving's later work.

Patrick matures mainly because he falls in love with a good woman and fathers her child -- and also because he has a number of memorable erotic encounters. A make-up artist almost dies choking on her gum during orgasm while her brother yells threats into the answering machine ("I'm gonna grind up your prick in a blenda. Then I'm gonna make ya drink it!"); an aging, dying feminist treats him like a friend; a ball-busting future anchorwoman demands his top-of-the-gene-pool seed; and a 51-year-old widow, unhappily pregnant, reads E.B. White in bed and then disappears, possibly having made up her entire life story. These single nights transform Patrick into the monogamist he becomes because they're complicated: He can't forget them like he could an easy night of near-anonymous sex.

The woman who really makes this passive playboy into a constant lover and devoted father is the widow of the man whose appendage he receives in one of the first-ever hand transplant surgeries. Doris Clausen wants visitation rights with the hand, maybe because she's obsessed with Patrick from TV and actually arranged to have her husband's hand donated to him before the man died in a handgun accident -- or maybe because she truly loved her husband. Patrick is smitten, possibly because part of Otto Clausen is attached to his left arm, and possibly because he's had prescient dreams about Doris and her country house.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"