"Until I Find You"

A cross-dressing young actor, his tattoo-artist mother and his church-organist father - this can only be John Irving country

BY CLAIRE DEDERER | Claire Dederer is a writer in Seattle.

July 17, 2005

If you're going to write a novel that's 800 pages long, you'd better have a good reason. You'd better be making an aesthetic or political statement. You'd better be giving us a sweeping overview of society or a generations-long family saga or a disaster.

In the strange case of John Irving's new 800-page novel, "Until I Find You," we get none of these things. What we get is the story of a movie star who misses his dad. From the time he is 4, when the novel opens, till his late 30s, when the novel comes slowly to a halt, like a cruise ship that needs a few football fields of sea to stop, Jack Burns longs for his missing father. Along the way he gets molested and famous, in that order.

Jack is born to a tattoo-artist mother and a vanished father. All his mother will tell young Jack is that his father was a player of church organs, a wooer of girls and a collector of tattoos. "Jack would spend years trying to discern the difference between his mother's version of his father and who his father really was." When Jack is 4 years old, his mother takes him on a kind of tour of the North Sea, where they travel from port to port looking for Jack's dad.

They never find him, and from there on out, Jack's life takes place in a landscape populated almost entirely by women. He attends a girl's school in Toronto, where the older girls take a not-entirely-innocent interest in the beautiful young boy. As a first-grader, he develops a relationship with a much older girl, Emma, who protects him and fondles him variously. He begins his lifelong career as a cross-dressing actor: He's such a breathtaking combination of delicate beauty and pure talent that he ends up winning all the lead female roles in the school plays - despite the fact that almost all the other students are actual girls.

Jack's and Emma's mothers fall in love and move in together, as if to emphasize to Jack the overweening femininity of existence. When he's 10, they pawn him off on the terrible Mrs. Machado, the short, squat, mustachioed acquaintance who becomes his molester. Jack escapes to a couple of boarding schools, to college in New Hampshire and finally to Los Angeles, where his unusual gifts lead him to become a movie star. He has a brilliant career: "Jack was the guy Julia Roberts didn't marry. He told the lie that made Meg Ryan leave him. He suffered as a smitten waiter, the one who spilled the vichyssoise down Gwyneth Paltrow's back."

Throughout, his polestar is his quasi-step-sister, Emma. Big, mannish, vulnerable, bossy and hilarious, Emma makes a perfect foil for Jack, even as the two of them slip into the kind of depression that can only be brought on by Hollywood success. Jack eventually finds solace in therapy, where he tells his life story, chronologically, to the intimidating Dr. García. "'Where does it end?' Jack asked Dr. García, when he'd been spilling his life story aloud for four, going on five, years. 'Well, it ends with looking for your father - or at least finding out what happened to him,' Dr. García said. ... Jack too hastily concluded that if his retelling of his life were a book, for example, his finding his father would be the last chapter."

That "for example" is a little specious, or at least clever, as a book about Jack's life is not a random possibility - it's the very project Irving is undertaking. And it's not just Jack's life. In a recent interview, Irving explicitly linked the events of the novel to his own history. He described his own fixation on his absent father and his own experience as a young boy of being molested by an older woman. Not for him the usual coy evasions of the autobiographical writer - he frankly spoke of struggling with the novel because it so closely mirrored the events of his own life. Of course, it ultimately doesn't really matter whether or not these things happened to Irving - the novel succeeds and fails by its own virtues and faults. But it's enlightening to see Irving parading his demons in an interview, because it shows the extent of his obsessiveness.

Irving, it's true, has always worried a handful of themes. His obsessions are one of the reasons we keep coming back to him. At his best - in "The World According to Garp" or "The Cider-House Rules" - Irving gives us a big, rich, funny, freaky world animated by an anything-can-happen spirit.

Some of those old themes show up here: transvestites, dominating mothers, wrestling, older women, New England prep schools. Others are new: tattoos, church music, acting. But in "Until I Find You," Irving hits his notes even harder than usual. To take as an example his central motif of tattooing: We get pages and pages of tattoo arcana; we get not one or two tattooist characters, but nearly 10; we get visits to tattoo parlors all across northern Europe. Irving is a writer who loves his pet preoccupations; here he seems to let them off the leash. The result is an exercise in excess: too many tattoos, too many church organs, too many scenes of Jack's penis being manipulated by some older girl or woman. Too many pages.

In light of the excessive nature of the book, it's helpful to remember that Irving is a writer in the position of having to please only himself. He's achieved a stature from which he doesn't have to please an editor or an audience to get published. It's a dangerous place to be. He gets a little more latitude to indulge himself.

Funny thing is, Irving's indulgences make for a shabby kind of greatness. This is by no means an entirely successful book. It never earns its length, and it wears out its welcome like crazy. But there's something exhilarating about the way Irving just keeps chipping away at what a therapist might call his "stuff." He writes like a man who couldn't do it any other way.

Toward the close of the book (spoiler alert!) Jack goes back to northern Europe to re-create that trip he took with his mother when he was just 4 years old. Without giving away too much, we get a glimpse of Jack's father, covered in tattoos, pounding away on a church organ to an admiring audience. He's playing the music that has haunted him his entire life. At the end of the performance, his playing begins to fall apart. Mistake piles on mistake, but he plays on, a little mad, a little inspired.

That's Irving. He plays his song, familiar and weird, like a madman. For 800 pages, he makes old mistakes and new mistakes and just continues to soldier on. For the rest of us, "Until I Find You" is charming, occasionally brilliant, occasionally dull, certainly overlong. But you get the sense that, for the author, the book could not have been one page shorter than it is.