Until I Find You

Beginnings are hard. Endings are harder. And in the case of “Until I Find You,” both the beginning and the ending are quite rocky. The middle of the book, however (and in a novel of more than 800 pages, the middle is quite hefty) ...well, the middle is rather delightful. Reading this novel is like eating a gourmet sandwich beautifully crafted between slices of two-day old soggy bread.

It pains me to fault Mr. Irving for his apparent meandering in the first section of this novel and for the disappointment of the novel’s conclusion. To be fair, no imaginable ending could have lived up to the inevitability of this tale’s conclusion. Irving’s masterful storytelling throughout the bulk of the novel sabotages its own ending. An show more empathetic reader—and as a lifelong fan of Irving’s work, I consider myself forgiving to a fault—can happily overlook the seemingly random details of the novel’s opening section as their impact and significance emerges clearly through the development of Jack Burns, the novel’s protagonist. But the ending. Not even a writer of Irving’s talent could have wheedled his way out of the trap he set for himself.

This novel’s—and its main character’s—resemblance to numerous other Irving novels (most notably TS Garp in “The World According to Garp,” Homer Wells in “The Cider House Rules,” and Owen Meany in “A Prayer for Owen Meany”) is both its greatest strength and its most debilitating weakness. All of the hallmark Irving quirks and issues are there, but he’s handled them more artfully in those earlier novels. Jack—a budding actor with a talent for cross-dressing and a penchant for older women (who are, in fact, molesting him)—is an inscrutably complex character but almost certainly not the most likeable character in the novel. As he grows up without the guidance or support of a father, he becomes a true conundrum—an introverted actor.

Halfway through the novel, the narrative pivots dramatically (to provide more details would certainly spoil the plot), but suffice it to say that Jack shifts his focus from constructing identities and stories to reconstructing identities and stories—he realizes that everything he thought he knew about the most important people in his life was a mere narrative construct, and he sets about attempting to reconstruct those narratives in a search for truth—quite an ironic undertaking for a man whose profession relies on his ability to create convincing fictions.

In the end, Irving’s prose is—as ever—amusing and poignant (often at the same time), and this novel proves that he has regained his ability to weave a compelling tale around interesting characters, a skill that came into question in “The Fourth Hand,” the novel that preceded this one. While by no means his best work, “Until I Find You” demonstrates an imminent return to form for Irving—a form that I hope continues to evolve in his next novel. show less

john irving is such a good writer. i mean, a *really* great writer. if not for that, this book would get probably 1 to 1.5 stars at the most. it's easily 650 pages too long, first of all. the first 550 pages of the book should have been more like 75 pages. i know that irving experienced abuse that he didn't recognize as such when a young man, but the sexual stuff he writes about regularly is a bit ... too much and too weird and i wish he would get therapy for it. (and stop writing about it so much.) the number of times he talks about the main character sitting (at a movie, for example) with someone who just holds his penis - it's dozens.

i love his writing. truly. and the story, at its base, if you break it down, is a good and show more interesting one. but i don't like the way he tells it; i don't believe almost any of the dialogue rings true; i wanted more from this. if an editor (or irving himself, of course) had cut literally 75-80% of this (and 100% of the weird penis stuff) and made it crisp and tight, this would be amazing. but as it is, it's mostly just strange and too long and missing its potential. show less

By now I think I've clearly established that I'm a huge John Irving fan. I just finished his most recent, Until I Find You, and I loved it. I adored it. I didn't want it to end, which may seem odd since it's 820 pages long. Please don't let the length deter you.

I loved the narrator's voice, the characters-major and minor. I loved the story, the journey, the quest; the twists and the passage of time. Every last bit of it seemed plausible to me, but I've always embraced the bizarreness of Irving's characters and settings.

Two favorite passages:

So much of what you think you remember is a lie, the stuff of postcards. The snow untrampled and unspoiled; the Christmas candles in the windows of the houses, where the damage to the children is show more unseen and unheard.

If you can't forgive her, you'll never be free of her. It's for your own sake, you know- for your soul. When you forgive someone who's hurt you, it's like escaping your skin- you're that free, outside yourself, where you can see everything. show less

I finished this behemoth of a book Thursday night. I'm torn about whether to recommend it or not. It's John Irving after all and the writing itself is exactly what you'd expect. I've always loved Irving and A Prayer For Owen Meany is probably my favorite book ever. So I personally was completely caught up in the story. I read 800+ pages in the time it usually takes me to read a 300 page book. There were times I literally couldn't put it down.

That said, the story itself is disturbing. It's about a child who is sexually abused. It's about memory and what we think we know and how we are changed when we find the truth (in this way, it was reminiscent of the excellent Julian Barnes book, The Sense of an Ending).

There are graphic scenes in show more the book. That probably won't surprise you if you've read any other Irving. But the scenes don't feel prurient. They simply feel like reporting a story. Or, as Irving says in this book, telling the whole story in chronological order.

So, would I recommend it? Maybe. Did I think it was a good book? Definitely. show less

There were parts of this novel I really liked and parts I struggled to read and it is too long. The reader meets Jack Burns as a four year old and we follow him, sometimes second by second to his early middle age. The story is mostly told chronologically but does look back in later chapters. As a four year old, Jack travels between tattoo parlours, through various Northern European countries. His mother tells him they are following his father. Back in Canada and the USA, there is so much abuse I almost gave up reading. It is only John Irving's brillian writing and his humour that kept me going as I shut my eyes to the worst parts to avoid nightmares. This is when he meets Emma, five years older than Jack who becomes his best friend. show more Together they live in LA among the stars.and Jack gets a therapist. There are slightly expected twists before the end, lots of detail about films and Hollywood parties and then the big turn around. I kept going to the end, as I say because the writing is so good but I would have loved this to have been shorter.. show less

John Irving has a few recurring themes in his books: wrestling, bears, family, (disturbing) sex, and writers. This book could have used a bear or two instead of all the sex; there is just too much. If Until I Find You would have half the amount of sex, it would have been a slightly absurd, but wonderful story about family and forgiveness.

Forget what you’ve heard about John Irving – the man is popular, yes, but he is not really a popular novelist. He is instead a popular biographer of fictional people, and if you read three or four of his better literary efforts this is very apparent; the strength of his work comes not from the popular novelist’s knack for finding one central dramatic occurrence around which to build a story, but a biographer’s bent for showing how every occurrence – the ones that ought to be interesting, the ones that ought to induce yawns, and best of all, the ones that ought to be kept private – is a part of the single seamless drama of a life.

Irving himself must have forgotten he wasn’t a popular novelist for a while. There really is show more no other explanation for his last book, The Fourth Hand, which is, with barely a handful of compelling characters squeezed into its 316 pages, both literally and figuratively thin, at least by its author’s usual lofty standards. The Fourth Hand is far from a terrible book, but it isn’t the sort of 500 or 600 page Irving story whose fullness you can crawl down inside, spread yourself out and live within for a good long time – not the way you can with, say, The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany or A Widow For One Year.

Thankfully Irving has abandoned the faster pace of The Fourth Hand and returned to the longer, fuller structure of which he is a master, and the result is the bulkiest of all his novels to date – essentially the biography of fictional Hollywood actor Jack Burns’ life without a father, Until I Find You covers nearly four decades of Burns’ personal history, makes use of more than a half-dozen countries as settings, and tips the scales at more than 800 pages.

At least one thing is certain: You won’t be able to pan this novel for being too thin.

Whether you’ll pan it for other deficiencies, however, will likely depend on your patience for the increasingly repetitive themes and crutch details of the Irving canon. Wrestling, the early development of the careers of writers, missing fathers, dysfunctional relationships and life at elite boarding schools – read the list of ingredients, and you’d swear this was the exact recipe Irving used to cook up his masterpiece, Garp. And you’d be right. But to his credit, in Until I Find You Irving does stir things around a bit, adding a dash of something new here and there as needed, so that, finally, the story is not – as some will no doubt suggest – the work of an author who after 11 books can do nothing more than repeat himself.

The narrative joins Burns at the age of four. His mother, Alice, a professional tattooist, has dragged him to Europe to track down his ink-addicted, organ-playing runaway father, William Burns, an alleged womanizer whose lifelong goal is to play all of the most famous organs in the world while simultaneously covering every inch of his body in ink.

Like the best biographers, Irving’s sense of setting is impeccable, and his take on the colorful history and inhabitants – primarily prostitutes, tattooists and tattoo addicts – of the underground ink culture prove it. But he doesn’t linger overlong in the overseas settings. The pursuit of William from country to country, organ to organ, tattooist to tattooist, quickly becomes more than Alice can sustain, and she returns with her son to Canada, where the boy is allowed to attend an all-girls private grade school and hone his acting skills – both on the stage, and in his daily life.

From the moment he begins school, Jack’s life takes shape around a series of strange relationships with women, most of them older and in some way emotionally challenged. He’s molested by high school girls, their mothers, his maid, a teacher, and later, by complete strangers. Although these women are generally in a position of power over him, Burns convinces himself the encounters are all his fault; he believes he takes after his father, the womanizer, and that he’s simply fulfilling his destiny.

This, it turns out, might not be the case. While Burns continues to harbor genetic guilt throughout his life, there’s a surprising twist that forces the famous actor, known for his penchant for playing transvestite roles and for the Academy Award he won for best adapted screenplay, to revisit his past and rethink everything he – and we – have believed about his life.

Until I Find You is a compelling illustration of the power of suggestion and false memory, a big, sometimes slow-moving, but always interesting book with a satisfying payoff. It’s both a mystery and a history. And it’s properly perverse and warped so as to appeal to Irving fanatics (check out the odd thing women do for Burns inside dark movie theaters – and here’s a hint: it probably isn’t at all what you expect).

It’s also 100 or so pages too long. But set aside a couple of weeks to tackle its length, to live within its pages, to watch its characters and their odd struggles to understand and love one another, and you’ll recall why, regardless of how you might strain to describe it, John Irving’s work is so undeniably popular, and more importatantly, so very, very good. show less