Customer Reviews

Until I Find You: A Novel

5 star:		(64)
4 star:		(62)
3 star:		(36)
2 star:		(47)
1 star:		(78)

 

 

I have to start off by saying John Irving is my favorite living writer. Both 'A Prayer for Owen Meany' and 'The Cider House Rules' are fantastic timeless classics that will secure him as our modern day Dickens. After the disapponting "Fourth Hand" I had high hopes for this book. Yet for the first time with an Irving book I found myself getting bored.
Jack Burns, a famous actor, searches for the father who abandoned he and his mother when he was a small boy. In classic Irving style there are a myriad of colorful characters who populate the novel, but having read everything else he's written, so many themes from previous novels are re-worked (sexual abuse the most dominant)that it feels like Irving is trying to wrestle his own demons and needs to take advice given to Jack and, "Forgive and move on."
However the biggest problem for me was I felt no connection with Jack. For the first time I felt I was reading about someone I couldn't care less about, so any supposed emotional wallop at the end was lost. I never felt there was an Owen or Wilbur in the whole book. Even Emma Oastler,who is one of the novel's best characters, pales in comparison to the very similar Hester Eastman, from Owen Meany.
The book has some great laugh out loud moments, (in particular Jack's attending an all girl school in Toronto),if you can get beyond the strong sexual abuse and misuse that occurs rather frequently in the first 400 pages. Anyone who is a rabid Irving fan will want to read it and judge for themselves, but for a first timer, I'd strongly suggest the two superb novels I mentioned earlier.

In sports, especially boxing, there are always those formerly great athletes who stick around too long for one last season or one last fight and in the process tarnish their legacy by revealing themselves to be merely ordinary. Starting with his last book, "The Fourth Hand" and continuing with "Until I Find You", John Irving is tarnishing his reputation as a great author of books like "The World According to Garp", "The Cider House Rules", and "A Prayer for Owen Meany." For a huge fan of Irving's older work like myself, "Until I Find You" is without a doubt the author's most disappointing effort.

The book gets off to a pretty good start with 4-year-old Jack travelling to Scandinavia with Alice, his mother, supposedly in search of his womanizing father William. This turns out to be untrue for the most part. The pace at this point is good as Irving takes the reader to Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Amsterdam (which should be familiar to Irving readers from "A Widow for One Year") where we meet lots of interesting tattoo artists, organists, choirgirls, and the obligatory prostitutes. By the time Jack and Alice board the ship for Canada, there could be an interesting story about the relationship between Jack and his parents.

But then it takes Irving about 600 pages to really get back to this story. For those 600 pages we have a lot of filler and the obligatory private schools and wrestling lessons that have become Irving staples. In the case of his earlier works, they add to the story, but in "Until I Find You", it does little more than fill the reader in on each year of Jack's life.

The most controversial aspect of the book, the sexual abuse of Jack at the hands of a Portuguese nanny and to a lesser extent the sister of his mother's girlfriend, serves no real purpose in relation to the overall story. It's almost as if it came from another novel and somehow got mixed in. There was so much talk about Jack's "little guy" at this point in the book I seriously thought of not finishing. I found the almost constant discussion of 9-year-old Jack's "little guy" to be more disturbing than just about all the gore and debauchery in "American Psycho", the book I read before this. Not just because it was talking about child abuse, but because it didn't seem to ADD anything to the story. What did this have to do with Jack's missing father or mother? Granted if he had a mother and father looking after him maybe he wouldn't have been abused, but it didn't really help move the story forward.

Mixed in with the child abuse during Jack's elementary school years at St. Hilda's mostly girl's school are several ham-handed attempts to create humorous situations. The writing here is so self-conscious and obvious that I found myself groaning. The worst refers to one teacher who was born in a hurricane and Irving several times thinks it's funny to contrast this to her calm demeanor. The first time was mildly amusing, but he mentions this over and over again until it's just not funny.

After the child abuse, and mandatory New England prep schools--Exeter again!--and wrestling, Jack goes to Hollywood and even wins John Irving's Oscar for Best Screen Adaptation in 2000. None of this matters. Again, it's just a lot of filler. John Irving does not seem the logical choice to play an actor. Make no mistake about it, Jack Burns is a thinly-veiled John Irving. My personal theory is so much of the filler happens to Jack Burns because it happened to John Irving.

Therein lies the problem for me as a reader. In his own books--"The World According to Garp" and "A Widow for One Year"--Irving decries autobiographical writing and writing for therapy. Yet with "Until I Find You" he manages to do both. There can be nothing more disappointing when a great author BECOMES everything he's claimed to despise.

After the book plods along through the wilderness of Jack's life for 600 pages, it finally gets back to the point when Jack goes back to Europe and realizes that his mom was the bad guy, turning him against his father for all those years. Then Jack meets his long-lost sister and finally meets his father. Unfortunately, at that point the book ends, just when it was getting interesting.

I would have liked to see a lot more of Jack with his sister and father, to see if they could really make things work and become some kind of family unit. This might have been possible if there hadn't been so much filler taken from Irving's life. And so where the formerly great author fails is by deliving his autobiographical therapy session and not a compelling and well-thought-out novel.

After the subpar "The Fourth Hand" and even lesser effort of "Until I Find You", there is little doubt to me that Irving's best work is behind him. As a great fan and admirer of his work as an author, I only hope he realizes that he's stayed in the game for one fight too long. Time to hang 'em up.

I am a loyal fan of Mr. Irving and have read his entire collection of stories over the years. But this book probably should have been edited down to a more reasonable size based on the nature of this particular story. It could have had some more material added and then possibly split into a sequel...

Despite the weighty moroseness and risqué portions of the book, which others have described, there are some other aspects of the story I found appealing. I found the minor characters to be very useful in fleshing out the living world around the main character and though some might think the number to be excessive, I think it actually helped.

Also, the masterful usage of flashbacks and a certain prevailing sincerity of conviction in telling the tale over all, kept me reading its 800+ pages.

It's a fine addition to his body of work and I eagerly await the next.

Also recommended, Anna's Trinity by Howard Cobiskey.

The talent on display in Irving's early novels was staggering in scope. So, because of these early reads, I hang on, awaiting the next novel but only disappointment follows. The World According to Garp is a treasure, The Hotel New Hampshire is a gem. Until I Find You is an excessively (and unnecessairly) drawn-out foray into disfunctional childhood, parent-child relations and the continuing search of the adult for the child. Irving has already done all of this and done it much better!! I understand this is semi-autobiographical...but the repetition and overflowing verbage could only satify the author himself. It is an artist's most difficult job to know when the task is complete...in this case, that would have been some 300 pages less than the more than 800 those of us who stayed the course waded through. The removal of hundreds of adverbs, adjectives and repetitive phrases would surely be welcome. I will not be reading Irving's next slog into his phyche..been there, done that. And, in an aside, as I parent, I found the 4-year-old Jack quite remarkable for his age. If his is the true voice here, it is overextended and unbelievable. A man of Irving's background will, of course, use those emotions, those holes in his soul, to spur creativity...fine. Just please stop beating us over the head with your angst.

Irving, a self-described comic novelist, has produced a comic novel with a lot of weight--in more ways than one. Yes, Until I Find You is long, and there are times (and reasons) why the novel seems a bit of a slog in places, but Irving's new novel also contains much that is good about Irving's better works. For one thing, it's more like The World According to Garp than any of his other novels, and Garp is what put Irving on the map as an author. The novel's main character, Jack Burns, is a fascinating and sympathetic character as a child--but the middle portion of the book suffers somewhat as Jack is not all that sympathetic as an up-and-coming movie actor. On the other hand, Irving's take on life in Hollywood redeems this section of the book, even as the reader works to get through it in order to get to Jack's redemption as a human being.

Central to the novel's theme is the fallibility of memory, and how it shapes who we are as a person. Additionally, much of Jack's personality is shaped by his absent father, who Jack believes has abandoned him, the sexual abuse Jack endures as a child, and his subsequent inability to have a "normal" relationship with women as an adult. Irving, who never knew his father and who was also a victim of sexual abuse as a child, is clearly exorcising some demons here.

There are fewer set comic pieces than in most Irving novels, but when they arrive, they are likely as not to make the reader laugh out loud. As always, Irving's penchant for exhaustive research pays off--when the novel immerses itself in descriptions of the North Sea tattoo tradition as well as european religious organ music, the reader is treated to a wonderful introduction to both subjects.

Anyone who is a fan of Irving's earlier work will enjoy this book--Jack Burns is a classic Irving character, and the plot of the novel, which Irving has stated is his most autobiographical to date, makes for a great read.

Until I Met You is Irving's best book since A Prayer for Owen Meany, which happens to be my personal favorite among Irving's novels.

I just finished this book last night and could not have been more disappointed. I agree with the many reviewers who have complained that they felt no connection with any of the characters. It's hard to be moved by a book when you could care less about what happens to the central character and I'm amazed that I could read about a character for 820 pages and NOT care at all.

The book has no emotional weight - in contrast to Owen Meany, for example. Does anyone really care about the plight of a Hollywood actor? I sure don't. The novel is populated entirely with unsympathetic, mean-spirited, hopelessly vapid characters.

The frequent and graphic depiction of child molestation almost made me feel as if I was reading something I shouldn't be reading. I'm no puritain, but if you are going to subject the reader to such horrors, try to have a point. In the overall context of the novel, these passages simply seem gratuitous.

My greatest criticism is that the writing is just plain bad. I've read Garp and Owen Meany (which I believe is a masterpiece) and appreciate Irving as one of the greatest living writers, but this book is just terrible. The dialogue is wooden and unconvincing. The evolution of the characters is contrived and predictable. The constant references to Hollywood personalities seem like the star-struck ramblings of an adolescent.

Save yourself a lot of misery and skip this book.

'Until I Find You' is a great novel after the disappointing 'The Fourth Hand'. Jack Burns is a typical John Irving character: an only child, raised alone by his mother, we follow him through his school years, his wrestling, his 'special' relationships with older and younger women, until he becomes an actor in Hollywood. He is weird of course, some say too weird. His mother is a tattoo artist, his father is an organist (not onanist!).
Jack (four years old) and his mother go on a search in Europe to find his missing father, or are they?
This is a novel about penises, prostitutes and forgiveness.
It is long and some will say overlong (some of the minor characters - tattoo artists, coaches, teachers, girlfriends of Jack - could have been deleted, but like Dickens, Mr Irving likes to show what he can...)
The novel starts with Jack and his mother, and it ends in Zurich with...see for yourself!
I read all the 820 pages of my copy, published in English by the Dutch publisher De Bezige Bij in Amsterdam!
I read my first John Irving 'The world according to Garp' in 1979 when I was a student in Louvain, Belgium. I am now 45 and I still like reading his novels.
'Until I Find You' is without a doubt one of his most satisfying books.
Take your time! It will grow on you!

Irving, John, Until I Find You. New York: Random House, 2005.
To write an 821 page novel you need a word processor. Processed words can get out of hand, can get to looking silly. On page 690 we read, "He is often seen sitting up in bed in the morning--just his top half, naked." Fine. But the author plunges on witlessly: "(The rest of him is under the sheets)." After reading endlessly about sex and tattoos and having sex and being tattooed, we get the ultimate confidential admission: that this author is tired. His word processor is wreathing the book with redundancies. That cost him a star in my review. Another star winked out because this Jack character the author presents is pretty boring. His sexuality is mixed as well as mixed-up; his lines as an actor come out of his mouth offstage. He's not worth the effort. The book lost a third star because early in the book Jack and his mother make a long trip around the North Sea ports when he is age four. By the time he repeats the trip, 400 pages later, we are days or weeks beyond that point in our reading and have forgotten where they went, who they met, and why it matters.

I would have given the book two stars were it not for the title, which is meaningless. Oh, and there's no humor.

As a huge John Irving fan, I was very excited about his new book. I am disappointed in this new novel, however. It's a lot like one big therapy session, with stream of conciousness ideas mixed with a loose story. It's hard to really feel anything for Jack, or even get a real imagining of his character--he just seems to drift from one sexual encounter to another. All the themes are here from previous novels: young boy with single mother; traveling (this time primarily Amsterdam, not Vienna) and rootlessness; tranvestites; older women, younger man, etc. But I just don't feel anything new is covered here, and am struggling to even finish this morose, dire novel. What keeps me going, though, is my belief that Irving is brilliant, and must be putting me through this exercise for a reason!

I'm always rather amazed to see the novels of Irving that others consider to be his best - since they never tend to follow my own personal favorites. However, I'd have to say that I agree with the general consensus on this one - it just doesn't gel. While there are interesting characters, there really wasn't anyone with whom I was particularly sympathetic. I found the whole 4-year old Jack portion of the book to be completely unbelievable (I've known many a 4-year old and they don't act like Jack Burns did).

Interestingly, through some reasearch I found that the novel was initially written in the first person, which would have made the 4-year-old Jack Burns section forgiveable since that was part of the point of the novel...that memories are not reliable. However when told from the third person, that breaks down and just doesn't work for me. Third person is supposed to be what is happening...to go back at the end of the novel and say, "Oh...wait...that might have been incorrect," just rubs me the wrong way.

The first half of the novel almost seemed like Irving was trying to throw-in all the things one expects in one of his novels (incest or rape, prep school, wrestling, and of late - providing travelogues)...to get them out of the way so he could really begin telling the story. And about halfway through, the story and characters begin to become more solid and interesting. Still, character motivations weren't always very well fleshed-out and I never really cared about Jack or any of the supporting characters.

I mean, I cried when we find that Sorrow floats and when Lilly stopped passing the open windows in the Hotel New Hampshire. I felt nothing for any character in this book other than perhaps a bit of revulsion. Perhaps that was what Irving wanted...his own little "Confederacy of Dunces." If so, I'd say he achieved it.

Bottom line: not his worst by a long shot, but very long-winded, repetitive, and filled with uncharacteristically forgettable characters. I'd say its only for the hardcore Irving fan, if that.