I quite enjoyed this slimmer (by comparison to his others) book. I picked it up because I've had a terrible cold and couldn't handle anything long or difficult. At the beginning the novel is funny as Irving creates a vivid and absurd scene of the lion attack. Patrick, the victim and main character, is a pretty boy playboy, about as superficial as one can be, and passive. The focus on the surgeon who transplants a new hand from a dead man is also witty. Over time, after receiving the hand transplant and through its eventual failure and amputation, Patrick develops and grows as a person, he becomes "round" in E. M. Forster's sense.

The motif of shared reading brings up E. B. White's Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, as well as Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient--since childhood I have wondered why characters in novels don't read novels (since that's what I was doing). There is also the obsession of one group of characters with the Green Bay Packers.