Until I Find You

This is a massive, engrossing novel spanning the first 38 or so years of Jack Burns' life. The early part of it finds 4-year-old Jack and his mother traipsing about Europe, living in various cities, always, according to the mother, in search of Jack's father. After Jack attends various schools in North America, he undergoes a period of disillusionment regarding his mother and becomes obsessed with learning what was really going on during the early, peripatetic years. This impels him to revisit the people and places of his childhood, an undertaking facilitated by the wealth and renown Jack has garnered through being a popular Hollywood movie actor. The characters are well drawn and the ambience of the locales well detailed, as would be expected considering that the author has 820 pages in which to work. We're also introduced or reintroduced to various areas of the author's expertise, notably collegiate-style wrestling and tatooing. There are passages of considerable humor, many featuring Jack's third-grade teacher, Caroline Wurtz, who doesn't hesitate to express her rather prim sense of what's appropriate in all stuations, e.g., it's okay to say "penis" at a party, but not "vagina," which she euphemizes into "thingamajig."

Until I Find You is the story of Jack Burns from age four until age 37 when he finally meets his father and by that meeting, becomes a changed and healed person. Jack's history, which takes him to becoming a major Oscar-winning film star (who is renowned for playing men dressed as women), is massive but beautifully detailed. Jack has a twisted and unusual upbringing. He is the son of a church organist who is famous for both his accomplished playing and for his eccentric personality. In Amsterdam, Jack's father practices on the church organ in the early morning hours in order to lure the spent prostitutes to church; his body is covered in tattoos of music and lyrics. Jack is raised by his single mother who is a renowned tattoo artist, and sent to a Toronto school dominated by girls hence sowing the seeds for his unrelenting passion for older women. Without apology or editorialising, the author describes at length Jack's sexual and emotional abuse throughout his childhood. Despite this murky environment, Mr. Irving gives us hilarious accounts of Jack's roles in the school plays, his constant misadventures and the eccentric people who surround him. Along with his bizarre childhood, the school plays are anything but conventional. Jack dazzles audiences with his portrayals of Tess from Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Hester from The Scarlett Letter and tops it off playing a girl accused of promiscuity in a cautionary Canadian play where he is required to break a bag of fake blood to indicate that the accused teenager is not with child, surely a first in the theatre. As full as a Victorian novel, this tale rumbles through Jack's boarding school days as a wrestler, his migration to Hollywood, his deep and lasting relationship with his best friend from the girls school, his enormous success as an actor and a writer as well as his total inability to function happily, oppressed by a cloud of anger, despair and confusion because he has not known his father. Finally, he finds him, as well as a half sister. Jack becomes a changed person. This tale demands a willing suspension of disbelief as well as a hefty dose of patience for some of the more frustrating personalities and situations described within. If you don't go with it, you will hate this book. I went with it, and was fascinated during all of its 900 plus pages.

I don't see how anyone can say this book is boring. I don't read nearly as much as I did even five years ago because so much of what I pick up bores me, and I forget it as soon as I put it down, but I could not put this one down. I read the entire thing in four days, giving myself a whopping headache from eyestrain. It is not "Cider House Rules", which is my favorite Irving book, despite the fact that most Irving fans I know love "A Prayer For Owen Meany" the best. It is also not "Son of The Circus", which is the only Irving book I found boring, and could not finish. I guess it may depend on how much you identify with the main character. While I certainly never went through any of what Jack Burns goes through in this novel, I do very much feel the pain of living in a culture where innocence is savaged because anything and everything has become acceptable in the name of self-expression, except a personal judgement that something is not acceptable and should not be tolerated. This books shows the extreme end point that will occur with that sort of thinking,and as melancholic as it is for the first 700 pages, the last 100+ pages are redemptive and uplifting. Others have said it all, so I don't need to go on. I just wanted to add my five stars to the ratings. I hope some of the people who were bored will give it another chance at some future time.

John Irving's eleventh novel tells the story of actor Jack Burns, whose search for his absent father ultimately leads him on a journey to find himself. At the novel's opening, we see young Jack and his tattoo artist mother, Alice, leave their native Toronto in search of Jack's long-lost father, a church organist who is also an "ink addict" --- a man who has become addicted to being tattooed. Their search leads them through all the northern ports of Europe: Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Amsterdam, to name but a few. When the search proves fruitless, they return to Toronto where Jack is enrolled in St. Hilda's, a parochial school for girls that just started admitting boys. "You'll be safe with the girls..." his mother tells young Jack. Soon after, he comes under the influence of an older, aggressive student named Emma Oastler, who takes it upon herself to school him in the ways of the world. At age ten, because of his small stature and angelic face, the drama teacher casts Jack in all her plays --- as the female lead. He becomes quite adept at acting and it becomes a lifelong passion. But there is a downside to all this female attention. Jack does not know how to interact with boys --- namely, how to defend himself against bullies. His mother signs him up for self-defense classes at a local gym where he meets Mrs. Machado, another older woman, and the two embark on an odd sexual affair of sorts. Strangely, Irving does not portray young Jack as a victim. He writes, "Jack Burns would miss those girls, those so-called older women. Even the ones who had molested him. (Sometimes especially the ones who had molested him!)" Irving, like his lead character, had a sexual relationship with an older woman when he was 11, and has commented that he "like Jack...would never say that he was abused or molested." These events come to symbolize, both literally and figuratively, Jack's loss of innocence. So the difficult issues at work here are ones the author himself is struggling with, and in his capable hands they are made a little easier to digest. After beginning an illicit relationship of her own, Jack's mother ships him off to an all-boys school in Maine, where he continues to excel in drama. Being able to play the female lead at an all-boys' school can come in extremely handy. In playing these many parts, Jack feels like he will better understand women and what they desire. He continues on to the University of New Hampshire, where he maintains the most normal relationship of his life with a coed named Claudia. (But in Irving's world, "normal" means "boring" and the relationship fizzles after a few years.) After graduation, he follows his dream (and best friend Emma) to Los Angeles, where his first acting job is as a crossdresser in a porn film. He gradually moves on to more mainstream movies but still doesn't feel totally fulfilled. He thinks back to the search for his missing father and decides he must find out what really happened. More instrumental to Ja

'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!