Lost and Found (Until I Find You - John Irving)

Member Name: ruth_cole

Product:	Until I Find You - John Irving
Date:	03/12/05 (213 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: affecting, intense and very personal semi-autobiographical novel packed with irving hallmarks

Disadvantages: not his very best moment

As a committed John Irving fan, it’s hard for me to write something that could be considered critical of the man, especially in regard to his most personal and autobiographical release to date. Easy to be flippant about The Fourth Hand (which reads a little too much like a draft of an interesting idea), it’s harder to be truly fair to Until I Find You, especially since I think it makes an enormous difference if you have read much Irving before.

Until I Find You is the story of actor Jack Burns, whose unnervingly steely tattoo-artist mother Alice takes him on a northern European odyssey on the heels of his absent father, tattoo-obsessed organist William. Jack, a beautiful and sexually precocious child, is then cloistered in the oestrogen atmosphere of a girls school and becomes an actor chiefly by playing to his internal “audience of one” – his father. Jack Burns barely navigates his life through a series of strong, very different women, finally deciding that it is one very important missing man he needs.

Irving has spent years denying that his common themes of distant and disrupted families (I won’t say dysfunctional, it’s his characters that are dysfunctional, never mind their families) are inspired by the fact that he never knew his birth father. His adoptive father – who provided him with the surname he still bears – was an excellent man, his childhood happy; no need existed to look for a character who was just a genetic imprint. And yet as he was writing Until I Find You, Irving finally acknowledged that for years he had been searching for his absent father to step out of the shadows, particularly after the success of The World According to Garp. In fact, Until I Find You was such a personal writing experience that at first it was written in the first person. At the realisation that this was too close to home, Irving yanked it from the publishers’ hands at the last minute, and rewrote it all in the third person.

Is this relevant? Yes and no. It helps to explain why there seems to be a stronger element of emotional clarity than ever in Irving’s writing. It also helps to explain, perhaps, why the comedy elements seem more routine and less natural than before, in my opinion. Writing about something that strongly speaks to you of real life and trying to weave this together with total narrative fiction is a hard task even for such an accomplished and eloquent man, and for once he seems to struggle slightly.

Knowing this also added an extra dimension of truth for me, however. Irving also writes of his/Jack’s accelerated adolescence. Irving lost his virginity at a painfully prepubescent age, the unknowing victim of abuse who did not recognise for almost ten years that the experience had been having sex. He simply knew he felt betrayed and let down by a woman he trusted, but also that he had been left with a fascination for older women. Jack has a similar experience, and aside from the fact that it is written with alternate delicacy and careful bluntness which makes it both painful to read and easy to believe, the innocence of Jack Burns – as preternaturally intelligent and insightful as he is as a child – is all the more natural for it seeming to be an autobiographical account.

Irving’s characterisation is typically excellent and roaringly typical. His strong, repellent mother-figure Alice is as icy as Garp’s Jenny Fields and a steely, impossibly damaged woman. As Jack begins to turn over his recollections in his mind and start to unpick the strands of his memory from hers, she undergoes incredible revolutions as a character, and yet stays unmistakeably Alice throughout. Jack himself, feminine but not effeminate, is almost transparent a character. So passive is he, so buffeted by the strong female presence in his life, that he seems to have no real personality of his own (other than his relentless passivity, his inability to resist sexual advances or make a decision) until he is capable of making one truly independent decision, upon the deaths or distance of most of those who have guided him. Along with him in this journey is the irascible, terrifying, damaged and yet protective Emma, a veritable orchestra of inconsistency and unpredictability who is nevertheless the one beacon of stability in Jack’s buffeted life. Reminiscent of The Cider House Rules’s Melony and A Prayer For Owen Meany’s Hester, she’s a raging and wonderful character, something to sink the teeth into.

All the hallmarks of Irvingism are here. Lost family, sexual discovery, writing, movie-making (with real names and people where possible, lending it a realistic air), prostitution and the twin beacons of New England and northern Europe all make an appearance. And here’s where I think it matters if you’ve read Irving before. Because if you haven’t, I think you’ll have the opportunity to be further swept away on his excellent prose and narrative solidity (there’s hardly a more carefully planned storyteller than him). His deep and careful character play and wonderfully bizarre set pieces are probably as strong as ever – but to me it felt like reading A Widow For One Year again, only with more self-indulgence and less natural flow. I’ll admit it; I was disappointed. Not that this wasn’t a very readable book, since it still only took me three days to blast through it’s near-1000 pages, but as one who worships the ground Irving writes on, it wasn’t quite the perfection I’d been expecting.

Being the long and rambling tome it is (though not perhaps as long and rambling as this review), it’s hard to give an accurate plot or character arc summary. There’s too much to-ing and fro-ing. There’s too much it would harm the book to know too much about. I would still recommend it, though perhaps more highly to those who haven’t ploughed, as I have, through the complete works.

I’m being a bit harsh, really, since slightly substandard writing from John Irving is still streets ahead of most. And having just read My Movie Business and found him to be a critical, argumentative fellow, I think that that I would still absolutely love to have a good argument with him – if only I could get over the awed dribbling.

Still in hardback until May 2006, it’s worth around £11 of your Amazon vouchers, although the rrp is probably significantly higher.

Summary: Moving personal tale of the search for a lost father