Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
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``Until I Find You'' by John Irving; Random House ($27.95)
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Near the end of John Irving's logorrheic new novel, his hero, movie actor Jack Burns, is describing his therapy - chronologically reciting everything that has made him laugh, cry or angry since, well, since he can remember - to two Swiss shrinks. "Your therapy sounds positively book-length," says one of them.
Indeed. Alas, therapy does not a great novel make.
As those who've enjoyed Irving's best books know, the absent unknown father is a major theme in Irving's fiction - "The World According to Garp," "The Cider House Rules," "A Prayer for Owen Meany" - and his life. Irving was born out of wedlock; he took his stepfather's name and always maintained he wasn't interested in knowing about his birth father.
But then he recently announced, via the New York Times, that his newest novel was his most personal, drawing as it did on his own experiences of being sexually abused at the age of 11 by an older woman and learning his late father's identity. He had been understandably depressed about it all, but found that antidepressants wounded his creativity.
So now we have the novelization, as it were, and as much as I'd love to say it's moving, eloquent, hilarious, poignant and so much more, the reality is something else entirely. "Until I Find You" is a bloated, tedious bore, a freakish parody of all that was eccentric and entertaining in Irving's earlier outings.
"Until I Find You" begins with Jack Burns as a precocious 4-year-old being led around Northern Europe by his tattoo-artist mother, Alice, in search of his itinerant organist father. As we're told more than once (we're told everything in the book more than once!), Jack, even at a young age, has terrific recall, which is why the endless details of this trip, including every tattoo seen or inked, make it seem as though we've spent Jack's entire youth in Helsinki, Stockholm, et al. But no, he's only 5 when he and Alice return to Canada and he enters a girls school, where he will begin his acting career - transvestites are a specialty - and his sexual education.
Jack is wildly attractive to women from the age of 4 - he apparently looks just like his father, William - and at St. Hilda's he is taken under the wing of Emma Oastler, 12 going on 18, who will become Jack's protector, roommate, career counselor and penis holder for the next two decades.
(Ah, yes, penis holder. Jack doesn't go to the movies without a woman holding his penis, which makes it somewhat awkward when he goes to the movies with two women.)
It is Emma who saves 10-year-old Jack from Mrs. Machado, his wrestling sparring partner, when the older woman is abusing "Meester Penis" so often the "little guy" is chafed and raw.
The little guy figures prominently in "Until I Find You," endlessly inspected and judged and used by women, mostly older than Jack. It's no surprise that Jack, though devoted in his way to the women in his life - teachers, Emma's mother, who is his mother's lover - isn't much for relationships with women his own age, though it's surprising how very boring his sexual misadventures are. The book is more than 800 pages and reads twice as long.
Even the Hollywood years - Jack wins an Oscar for his screenplay based on a book by Emma - are less inspired than your average issue of Entertainment Weekly. And then, when Alice dies of breast cancer, we get to go back to Northern Europe as Jack retraces his earlier search for his father and learns there are indeed two sides to every story.
Oh, and did I mention the endless dissertations on the art of tattooing?
Granted, there is nothing funny about sexual abuse, but there's nothing gut-wrenching about it in "Until I Find You," either. In part this is because Jack Burns is less a character than a cipher, a vehicle for Irving to explore issues of abandonment - both physical and psychic - rather than a flesh-and-blood creature about whom we can't help but care.
Given Irving's contention that "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, which add up to the same loss," one might expect the saga of Jack Burns to elicit at least a tear or two of sorrow. Sadly, "Until I Find You" yields only tears of boredom.
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(c) 2005, Detroit Free Press. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
