Summer Book PreviewsSummerAn early look at hot reading due out this summer.boy.By Julia Ridley Smith

The Fourth Hand by John Irving

Book-jacket blurbs have compared John Irving to Charles Dickens. Both are engaging storytellers with a wide social scope, and people tend to think of them in a similar way, remembering the humor and sentiment but little of the harsh truths they reveal. In Dickens, you have orphans, murderers, escaped convicts, rapacious greed, crooked lawyers and insanity — and that's just in Great Expectations. Past John Irving novels have included orphans, incest, rape, religious obsession, abortionists, pet bears, wife swapping, emasculation by car crash and a girl with her tongue cut out. (If I didn't know better, I'd think he was Southern.) His 10th novel, The Fourth Hand, carries on the obsession with severed body parts. The appendage lost in this novel, though, is a little less tender, only a hand. The hand belongs to a TV reporter and it is munched off by a lion in India while millions of viewers watch. Fortunately there is a famous surgeon standing by in Boston, eager to do the country's first hand transplant. While he waits for his big career opportunity, he sweetens the bitterness of his divorce by sleeping with his housekeeper. Meanwhile, in Wisconsin there's a woman who wants to donate her husband's left hand as a replacement for the reporter's, but the trouble is he's still alive and rather attached to it. John Irving returns to some of his favorite themes in a novel that promises to be moving and darkly funny.

Loving Pedro Infante by Denise Chavez

(Farrar Straus & Giroux)

Remember the first time you just had to rush out and buy that Tiger Beat or Spin or Rolling Stone with your favorite singer on the front? Remember staring at the cover and loving that person that you'd never met and never would meet, but about whom you knew stupid things like their favorite color? Denise Chavez depicts the heartache of the superfan in her new novel Loving Pedro Infante. Teresina Avila, a divorced woman in her 30s, works in a small town in New Mexico. She is in love with the good-for-nothing, but irresistible Lucio; he won't leave his wife yet keeps stringing Teresina along. She finds consolation as a member of the local chapter of the Pedro Infante fan club. A Mexican singer and movie star, Infante supposedly started out so poor he had to build himself a guitar. With his Elvis-like good looks and charm, he went on to make over 200 albums and appear in numerous movies. He met his untimely end in his third plane crash in 1957. Who could be a more perfect object for unrequited love? Sometimes being infatuated with a celebrity you can never know is easier than the frustration of loving the wrong person in the flesh. This is Denise Chavez's second novel. Her earlier Face of an Angel won the American Book Award.

A Fifth of November by Paul West

(New Directions)

Paul West is a master of evoking historical periods, and his characters are so well drawn that you forget to think of his novels as fictionalized accounts of real people. This is a writer who, in an earlier novel, Rat Man in Paris, made us care deeply about a guy who carried a rodent under his coat and showed it to people on the streets. In his 19th novel, A Fifth of November, West takes on Guy Fawkes and the English Gunpowder Plot of 1605. You may remember from high school history that Guy Fawkes is the fellow the English burn in effigy on a special holiday every year. What you might not remember is that he was one of 13 Catholic conspirators who botched an attempt to blow up Parliament and King James I. Widespread persecution of Catholics and priests followed, and central to West's story is Father Henry Garnet, a Jesuit hiding out in some of England's stately homes. Protected and provoked by the noblewoman who is hiding him, the priest is tormented by his sexual urges and his spiritual doubts. He is more interested in the ladies than in the Papist plot, and he's not sure his courage will hold up if he's found and tortured. Father Garnet's adventures eventually lead him to that dreaded destination familiar to any lover of novels about English history — the Tower of London.

The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall

(Houghton Mifflin)

This parody of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was due out in June, but a federal judge has blocked publication, ruling that the book violates the copyright of Gone With the Wind. Houghton Mifflin will appeal the decision, so keep an eye out for this book and buy it to strike a blow for the freedom to make fun of racist stereotypes enshrined in a popular book. The Wind Done Gone is a retelling of the story of Gone With the Wind from the black point of view. In Alice Randall's The Wind Done gone, Cindy, the unacknowledged, mulatto half-sister of Scarlett O'Hara is sold away from Tara and eventually makes her way to Atlanta, where she searches for love. Cindy is a strong black woman who nevertheless struggles in her relationship with her mother, whose maternal care was, not surprisingly, stunted by the conditions of slavery. While Randall alludes to events in Gone With the Wind, she has written a novel that stands on its own as a complex story of people leaving the Old South behind and trying to make their way in a new world order. Randall fell in love with Gone With the Wind at the age of 12. Thought to be the great, great grandchild of Confederate General Edmund Pettus and thus of mixed-race ancestry herself, Randall always wondered where the mulatto children were in Mitchell's version of antebellum life. The Wind Done Gone is Randall's inventive answer to her own question.

Somehow Form a Family:

Stories that are Mostly True by Tony Earley

(Algonquin Books, May 2001)

It seems that Tony Earley is determined to try out all the prose forms. First he made an impressive debut with a book of short stories (an almost impossible feat these days) called Here We Are in Paradise. Then his novel, Jim the Boy, set in a Depression-era small town, was praised by some as an instant classic. In his latest book, Somehow Form A Family: Stories that Are Mostly True, he turns his able hand to non-fiction in a collection of personal essays. Earley grew up a fundamentalist Christian in the mountains of North Carolina, then in 1996 was named one of 20 Best Young American Fiction Writers by English literary magazine Granta. Not surprisingly, his work often grapples with a feeling of being stretched between two places. His well-known short story, "Charlotte," chronicles the exodus of professional wrestling from that city. It is a moving and hilarious eulogy for the loss of the kind of innocence that compels us to cheer at a wrestling match that we know is all make-believe. Connected to that loss is the fact that the characters have come to the big city only to find it doesn't satisfy them any better than the small towns they've left behind. Similarly, Earley's essays are about the search to reconcile the place from which we come with the place where we end up. He approaches the big topics with humor and honesty.

This article appears in May 17-24, 2001.