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Irving sprawl: 824 pages


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More than 600 pages into John Irving's overstuffed latest novel, its major character, who has been spilling his life story to a psychiatrist for nearly five years, asks, "Where does it all end?"

With more than 200 pages to go in Until I Find You, impatient readers may ask the same question.

The psychiatrist is "the opposite of an editor," Irving writes. She tells her patient, a movie star who was sexually molested by an older woman when he was 10, "to leave nothing out" in a chronological accounting of everything that made him laugh, cry or feel angry.

For Irving, defender of the sprawling, emotional 19th-century novel, it's the longest, most autobiographical and ambitious novel of a successful career.

There are some brilliant and hilarious passages, but a big problem too: It's hard to get emotionally invested in movie star Jack Burns who, for much of the novel, is acting more than living. His mother says he was "an actor before he was an actor."

The novel deals with some of Irving's favorite themes: lost children, absent fathers and the passage of time. The ending is poignant, but it's a long and winding road getting there.

Burns is the illegitimate son of a Scottish choirgirl and a talented organist. His mother says his father abandoned them. He spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out what really happened, exploring memory and reality. One character tells him he's "pumped full of more misinformation than most magazines and newspapers, and that's saying something."

It's both sad and comic, full of melancholy and promiscuous sex.

Irving includes lessons about organs (the musical kind) and tattooing, "the ink and pain business." Burns' mother works as a tattoo artist, specializing in a rose that conceals a vagina. Burns' father decorates much of his skin with musical notes.

The plot, which covers more than 30 years, is set in Scotland, Canada, Scandinavia, New England and Hollywood. "The thing about Los Angeles, Jack would learn, is that it's unimpressed by you -- no matter who you are. Eventually, the city tells you, your comeuppance will come; exclusivity fades." In interviews, Irving has revealed that he never knew his own father and was sexually abused by an older woman when he was 11. In the introduction to the Modern Library edition of his most popular novel, The World According to Garp, he writes that "whether a novel is autobiographical or not is beside the point."

Perhaps, but Burns, like Irving, is a wrestler, attends Exeter and the University of New Hampshire and wins an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. (Irving won in 1999 for his screenplay of his novel The Cider House Rules.)

Given Irving's curiosity about a father he never met, it's easy to imagine that writing Until I Find You was therapeutic. In fact, one character tells Burns, "Your therapy sounds positively book-length." But therapy for the writer may be less helpful for the reader.

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