Until I Find You: A Novel [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: faithless boy, drama night, blanket sucking sounds, Miss Wurtz, Jack Burns, William Burns (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

From Publishers Weekly

Actor Jack Burns seeks a sense of identity and father figures while accommodating a host of overbearing and elaborately dysfunctional women in Irving's latest sprawling novel (after The Fourth Hand). At the novel's onset (in 1969), four-year-old Jack is dragged by his mother, Alice, a Toronto-based tattoo artist, on a year-long search throughout northern Europe for William Burns, Jack's runaway father, a church organist and "ink addict." Back in Toronto, Alice enrolls Jack at the all-girls school St. Hilda's, where she mistakenly thinks he'll be "safe among the girls"; he later transfers to Redding, an all-boy's prep school in Maine. Jack survives a childhood remarkable for its relentless onslaught of sexual molestation at the hands of older girls and women to become a world-famous actor and Academy Award–winning screenwriter. Eventually, he retraces his childhood steps across Europe, in search of the truth about his father—a quest that also emerges as a journey toward normalcy. Though the incessant, graphic sexual abuse becomes gratuitous, Irving handles the novel's less seedy elements superbly: the earthy camaraderie of the tattoo parlors, the Hollywood glitz, Jack's developing emotional authenticity, his discovery of a half-sister and a moving reunion with his father.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 848 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1ST edition (July 12, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400063833
• ISBN-13: 978-1400063833
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (271 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #247,507 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another Triumph!, July 15, 2005

By	Ophelia (Rochester, New York) - See all my reviews

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.

83 of 88 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not The Irving To Start With, August 2, 2005

By	Brett Benner (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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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.

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Down for the Count, September 11, 2005

By	BJ Fraser (Michigan) - See all my reviews

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.