At over 800 pages, John Irving's Until I Find You is a daunting proposition at best. Anyone who finishes it will have acquired forearm muscles, sore shoulders, and not much else. The story is self-indulgent, repetitive and, ultimately, boring, that cardinal sin that readers can't forgive. Longtime Irving readers have stayed with him through a few hits and a miss or two, but this is an all-time low. We are accustomed to Irving's work as quirky, bizarre, and off-the-wall and have forgiven all by calling such high-jinks and characters "imaginative" or "absolutely original." The only thing original about this tome is the descent into soft porn.

Jack Burns, the hero of the tale, is four years old when it all begins. He is the illegitimate son of Daughter Alice, a tattoo artist and, guess what, daughter of a tattoo artist. She takes Jack on a pilgrimage to find his womanizing father, William, a church organist and "ink addict." By seeking out church organs and tattoo parlors, she expects to find him. She doesn't, and by now we have spent more than a hundred pages in Northern European cities doing an imitation of Groundhog Day. Same story, different day: a little prostitution for Alice, a few questions asked; alas, no daddy.

Alice and Jack return to Toronto so that Jack may enter a previously all-girls school, which will admit little boys for the first time. There begins another 200 pages of the girls and the teachers abusing Jack, over and over again. By now, he is five and is, for some unfathomable reason, eminently interesting to girls and women. His "friend" Emma keeps careful track of "the little guy," as she calls Jack's penis, looking for signs of life. The worst part of all this is that none of it is funny or sad or even clever. There are wrestling vignettes, of course, and prep school tedium, but no bears. Maybe bears would have saved it. There were funny parts in The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules as well as poignant, horrific parts in both of those and other Irving novels. This story is flat. The voice never changes; it just drones on.

Jack becomes an actor. First, he is a boy in drag because he is so pretty, then he takes transvestite parts. He and Emma, now a published novelist, live together in LA, which provides endless opportunity for name-dropping. His career eventually takes off and he gets recognition and awards, but still no daddy. Irving, it turns out, never knew his father, either. Perhaps this exercise will exorcise that demon once and for all and Irving's next book will be about something more compelling than a little boy's penis and his trashy mother's antics. If you do make it through to the book's snapper of an ending, you deserve to find out what it is on your own. Call it a reward. --Valerie Ryan

Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns – his life, loves, celebrity and astonishing search for the truth about his parents.

When he is four years old, Jack travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, to several North Sea ports in search of his father, William Burns. From Copenhagen to Amsterdam, William, a brilliant church organist and profligate womanizer, is always a step ahead – has always just departed in a wave of scandal, with a new tattoo somewhere on his body from a local master or “scratcher.”

Alice and Jack abandon their quest, and Jack is educated at schools in Canada and New England – including, tellingly, a girls’ school in Toronto. His real education consists of his relationships with older women – from Emma Oastler, who initiates him into erotic life, to the girls of St. Hilda’s, with whom he first appears on stage, to the abusive Mrs. Machado, whom he first meets when sent to learn wrestling at a local gym.

Too much happens in this expansive, eventful novel to possibly summarize it all. Emma and Jack move to Los Angeles, where Emma becomes a successful novelist and Jack a promising actor. A host of eccentric minor characters memorably come and go, including Jack’s hilariously confused teacher the Wurtz; Michelle Maher, the girlfriend he will never forget; and a precocious child Jack finds in the back of an Audi in a restaurant parking lot. We learn about tattoo addiction and movie cross-dressing, “sleeping in the needles” and the cure for cauliflower ears. And John Irving renders his protagonist’s unusual rise through Hollywood with the same vivid detail and range of emotions he gives to the organ music Jack hears as a child in European churches. This is an absorbing and moving book about obsession and loss, truth and storytelling, the signs we carry on us and inside us, the traces we can’t get rid of.

Jack has always lived in the shadow of his absent father. But as he grows older – and when his mother dies – he starts to doubt the portrait of his father’s character she painted for him when he was a child. This is the cue for a second journey around Europe in search of his father, from Edinburgh to Switzerland, towards a conclusion of great emotional force.

A melancholy tale of deception, Until I Find You is also a swaggering comic novel, a giant tapestry of life’s hopes. It is a masterpiece to compare with John Irving’s great novels, and restates the author’s claim to be considered the most glorious, comic, moving novelist at work today.


From the Hardcover edition.

I've read most if not all of Irving's novels up to
and including Son of The A Circus. I would tell people
he is my favorite novelist.

No longer. This book is bloated. Nothing interesting
happens. The metaphors and symbols that made some of the
other books so interesting, especially "Owen Meany" are
not in here. Maybe they are, but they aren't too obvious.

Pointless, slow-moving. I've only read half of it and was
carried by my enthusiasm for Irving - who I considered to
be a master novelist and careful craftsman. It's readable
I guess... because I read 400 pages of it before giving up...
but it is humorless and takes so long in getting where it
wants to go I've forgotten where we were going in the first
place.

Not recommended. All the early books are shorter, tighter,
and wildly more interesting.

And I say "probably" because I was fairly traumatized by this book, and don't want to open the cover again to make even a casual determination of the veracity of my claim.

I wouldn't actually have minded the frequency of the appearance of the word "penis" at all except that for (hundreds) of pages, the main character, Jack Burns, is a very (very) young child being passed around by girls and women aged 10 to 40-something, subjected to all kinds of sexual "play" that he experiences as unpleasant and puzzling. Every page, paragraph, and sentence of a long section of the book is about the interminable sexual abuse this child suffers, and that not one person acknowledges, notices, or shields him from. Wait! I believe that he was rescued from one of the abusers. But, see above, I'm not going back to the source text to ascertain this.

John Irving was my first very favorite writer in adulthood. I read his first seven novels. Not only were the stories and characters completely immersing and lovingly portrayed as I had never seen before, somehow for the first time in a lifetime of voracious reading, I really noticed these little technical items like "foreshadowing" and structure. The clarity and brilliance of his novels could be amazing as demonstrations or lessons in story and proportion and dimension, and for me anyway, I could see that the devices being used were somehow also mimicked in the narrative itself. I'm talking about "Garp" especially, but I'm also talking about "Hotel New Hampshire". It wasn't just tricks, and it wasn't even real magic. It was the complete and perfect execution of the literary novel.

And so, here is my warning. "Until I Find You" is about sexual abuse. I have not been sexually abused, but reading the book felt like my feelings about sexual abuse. You will feel sick, you will feel revulsion for the people you spend the most time with, you will feel betrayed by the people who seem to care for you, and you will feel that you were somehow willing, if you continue reading the book until the end. The redemption did not feel like it counterbalanced the abuse.

What makes John Irving my favorite author is how his characters embody the best and worst of humanity. They could truly be real people; some of them you wish you could meet, others you're glad are not alive (but you're aware there are people out there like them). "Until I Find You" exposes an issue (sexual abuse) that is very real and does happen to people, much like "The Cider House Rules" speaks of abortion. And while this is only a novel, and should be read that way, I do think that people need to be aware of the power our choices have on not only our own lives, but others as well. It is a long book, but just like the other John Irving novels I own and have read, I couldn't put it down until I finished it...even though there are sections I would rather roll my eyes at. I agree with another reviewer that this is probably not the novel to begin with. "A Prayer for Owen Meany" might be a bette choice, a warm up, if you will.

The book begins slowly, opening with the main character, Jack, at 4 years old. Jack is geniously able to comprehend converstaions like an 8 year old- however it is still hard to believe he understands, nor REMEMBERS, travelling from country to country in search of his absconded father, William- an organ player about 26 years old.
Jack's mother, Alice is a tatoo artist who is very skilled at about 24 years old. She is on the quest to find William as he left her and their unborn child, Jack, in search of other organs and other women. Ironically, Alice and William met in a choir in church where he was the organ assistant and she was a choirgirl!
Alice is so thoroughly obsessed with finding William that she chases him across countries and oceans in search of him. She affords these trips with the funds she makes off of tatooing sailors and other men with images of vaginas imbedded in flower petals, naked women, realistic 3D hearts bursting, and other not-so-kid-friendly images.
John Irving is, as always, very blunt with his descriptions of human anatomy and forces you into the scenes with his visual imagery- not in an erotica sense. Tact is not necessarily his style. His statements can surprise you, yet are usually with much humorous undertones.
Alice is also so thoroughly immersed in thoughts of William that she is oftentimes very neglectful of 4 year old Jack. She lets him drink beer (though diluted with water), tatoo willing young men, crack through an icey pond and witness her have sex with a stranger while she was only one sliding door away from Jack's bed. She seems absent from the story- like her mind is continuously elsewhere, and Jack seems to sense it.

I have read this novel before and recall myself becoming immersed in the storyline around page 300. It is definitely a more intricate Irving novel. It has its quirky characters with their massive flaws. Irving's underlying humor resonates, as does his ability to include details and more details. Though, in "Until I Find You", some of the details are too much and about things/ places/ people who we do't care about.
Overall, this a great read - For those of you who aren't used to Irving's crass writing, I'd suggest "The Fourth Hand" or "The 158 Poud Marriage".

I've read all of John Irving's books with only a single exception, and I've become increasingly saddened by them. Without question once one of America's strongest writers, he seemed to peak with A Prayer for Owen Meany and has not come close to the quality of those earlier novels. There's always been a certain sameness to Irving's stories--the one book of which this is not true, A Son of the Circus, was a critical catastrophe--but it's wearing thin. Until I Find You unleashes the familiar Irving elements--wrestling, quirky characters including prostitutes and crossdressing, sexual preoccupation, and more in another coming-of-age, seeking-one's-true-self story, this time with tattoos and organ-playing thrown in for good measure. There are some terrific moments in the book, and one of the well-plotted 'switcheroos' that Irving so loves, and he must be credited for these. But the whole seems far longer than either the story or its telling warrant; as a 300-, or even 500-page book this might really have worked. At almost 850 pages, it doesn't. "Show, don't tell" goes the old writer's adage, but Irving ignores it to his detriment. The characters are seldom shown in detail, but more often talked about in the third person--there's scarcely any dialogue, it seems--and so we are detached from them. Personally, I'm not sure I could really ever buy the premise of the main character's sexual escapades at such an early age, and although I'm not a prude I found the unrelenting fixation on this child's sexual development distasteful--again, at half the length, and with more involvement in the character, it might have worked. The book is further bogged down by Irving the narrator's numerous parenthetical comments, which serve to show the reader how clever he is, but advance the story or characterizations not at all. The Amazon review calls the ending a 'snapper'--I found it simply ludicrous, and was reminded of the opening of Monty Python's Flying Circus, with the nude organist. Perhaps, for John Irving, it really IS 'time for something completely different.'