Until I Find You
By John Irving
Random House, 824 pages, $27.95
Big novels typically sort out into a couple of varieties. One is the literary lodestar that needs a lot of room to fulfill its ambition–to change the shape of fiction (“Ulysses”), to define the culture of its place and moment (“In Search of Lost Time”), to demonstrate the essential comedy within even the most serious human enterprise (“Catch-22”). The other type is the potboiler or bodice-ripper that is to literature what pemmican was to the pioneers: something portable that will last through a long trip. These books have little ambition beyond keeping the reader turning pages. In this cause, their authors concoct big stews of plot, tossing in as they go Spanish highwaymen and fair damsels, or cabals of old Nazi doctors with plots to blow up Antarctica, or something that is never seen but leaves a big footprint.
John Irving is widely considered to be a practitioner of the former craft, a serious novelist with a penchant for writing at length. Previous novels of his, such as “The World According to Garp,” “The Cider House Rules” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” hover around the 600-page mark. With his latest, “Until I Find You,” as he raises the page count beyond 800, Irving’s narrative hydroplanes above the surface of reality, racing across continents and years, introducing a dizzying cast of characters and a string of improbable events. All of which lend the book an air of pop fiction, what Graham Greene called (in reference to his own lighter novels) “an entertainment.”
The protagonist of “Until I Find You” is Jack Burns, born in the mid-1960s in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to a tattoo-artist mother named Alice. His father, William, a church organist, is long gone by the time Jack arrives, and Jack’s early childhood is spent tagging across northern Europe with his mother as she ostensibly searches for her missing husband. The trail is made easier to follow by virtue of William’s pursuit of tattoos to cover his body with the music he loves. Though not physically present, he ghosts Alice’s world.
Alice and Jack’s idiosyncratic itinerary takes them from church to tattoo parlor to church. Then, when Jack is 4, Alice abruptly calls off the search and settles her son in Toronto, at St. Hilda’s–in the main a girls school, but with boys allowed in the early grades. As the prettiest of the meager allotment of males, Jack becomes the focus for the attentions of the older girls. One in particular, Emma Oastler, becomes “the nap-time storyteller who had appointed herself his personal girl guide.” In particular, Emma enjoys holding Jack’s penis, which she refers to as his ” ‘little guy.’ ” This sets up a bond between them and a little kink in Jack, who, when he begins dating, must find women who will agree to hold the little guy during movies. This can prompt awkward social situations, as when he is accompanied to a movie by Emma and an actual girlfriend. Who will do the honors? (Please, somebody, call an usher!)
Physically, Jack grows up slight and beautiful and begins a theatrical path in life playing Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hester Prynne and Anna Karenina in the plays at St. Hilda’s. He eventually loses his interest in the stage and, along with Emma, falls in thrall to film. Out of school and living in Los Angeles, he begins a career playing dark, androgynous characters: a transvestite hitchhiker, a Janis Joplin-like rock star, a cross-dressing limo driver.
Although feminine in appearance, Jack–as the author makes clear–is straight. We’re told, “He couldn’t get used to taking showers with boys; Jack didn’t like looking at the other boys’ penises.” At boarding school, he takes up the manly sport of wrestling. He survives his gender-bending career “with his heterosexual orientation mostly intact.” His orientation is toward women, particularly older women. And everywhere he goes, there’s a willing–or even insistent–nanny or dining-hall dishwasher or headmaster’s wife to help him out.
The book’s most interesting plot thread is Jack’s friendship with Emma, who quickly finds success as a novelist while he is an aspiring actor. She gives him a ride on her coattails so they both reach stardom in quick order. (“In their own way, they were gods, Emma and Jack–uncool Canadian gods in the city of angels. And like the gods, they were remote.”) They live together in L.A., partners in a complex friendship that accommodates the fact that their mothers have become lovers. The adult Emma is physically heavy, light on self-esteem and troubled by a sexual dysfunction that ultimately leads to her death at 39 in bed with a teenager.
This core story–how Emma and Jack form an alliance of deep understanding and utter acceptance–holds a lot of potential, and is unfortunately too soon pushed aside to make way for more picaresque searching on Jack’s part. The last third of the book launches him on another journey, this time to find out who Alice really is and where his father has gone.
All along its way, the narrative lurches like a sewing machine, zipping along at a rapid clip, then suddenly slowing to take a corner, too often for not enough reason. Many of the vast array of minor characters are brought onto the page only to be ushered off with a little sweep of peculiarly detailed summary. We are told, for instance, that Loomis, a fellow wrestler at Jack’s boarding school, who has only been briefly mentioned, “in addition to losing his parents and older sister . . . had other losses ahead. He would be expelled from Blair Academy for getting a referee’s underage daughter pregnant. Loomis gave up an opportunity for a college wrestling scholarship because of it. He became a Navy SEAL instead. He was stabbed to death somewhere in the Philippines, while on a perilous undercover mission, perhaps, or drunk and rowdy in a bar–in either case, his killer was reputed to be a transvestite prostitute.” This is, I suppose, the sort of meandering available to the writer who has given himself 800 pages to tell his story.
But the book also holds passages of Irving’s muscular prose, as when, early on, the narrator tells us:
“In those days, a tattoo was still a souvenir–a keepsake to mark a journey, the love of your life, a heartbreak, a port of call. The body was like a photo album; the tattoos themselves didn’t have to be good photographs. Indeed, they may not have been very artistic or aesthetically pleasing, but they weren’t ugly–not intentionally. And the old tattoos were always sentimental; you didn’t mark yourself for life if you weren’t sentimental.”
The tattoos are trappings; sex is this novel’s central theme. Often it is approached from an angle that tries for comedy, as when Alice gets into Jack’s bed and finds he’s had a wet dream. He tries to sort things out, saying he knows, ” ‘It’s not blood, it’s not pee’ “:
” ‘Of course it isn’t, Jack–it’s semen.’
“Jack was thoroughly confused. (He failed to see how a wet dream could have anything to do with sailors!)”
On the surface, the book seems to be a galloping sexual bildungsroman. And yet, beneath the farce, a slow undercurrent of sorrow makes itself felt, touching on an inherent sadness in sex, and on the violations of self that are a part of so many children’s sexual awakenings. Commenting on the sexual power Leslie Oastler–Emma’s mother and Alice’s lover–has on Jack, the narrator says, “In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us–not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies.”
Because the one robbed in this story is a boy and the thieves (as well as the protectors) women, the book’s serious passages begin to tell a story uncommon in literature. You have to look for this though. I think it might be the intriguing 300-page novel secreted inside this sprawling, uneven one.
