Irving's indelible new odyssey

Saga of tattoo artist's son has heart

Mike Pearson, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, July 8, 2005

When you open a John Irving novel, you open a Pandora's Box of humor, pathos, sex, death, deceit and family dysfunction. A whole lot of dysfunction.

His characters are complex in their breadth and indelible in their quirks: T.S. Garp, whose mother impregnates herself by a wounded soldier. Homer Wells, who yearns to escape the Maine orphanage where he was raised, yet finds his happiest moments there and in the nearby apple orchards. Owen Meany, the boy who kills his best friend's mom with an errant baseball.

And now, Jack Burns, the son of a wandering tattoo artist, whose movie-star looks and obvious sex appeal cause older women to gravitate to him from a young age.

Burns is the protagonist of Irving's 11th novel, Until I Find You, which covers 30 years in the life of its central character, and stretches from Amsterdam to Toronto to New Hampshire to Hollywood. It's a picaresque novel if ever there was one.

It's also a big book. It spans 882 pages and weighs in at nearly three pounds. You could hurt someone if you threw this novel at them.

So what's it about?

How much time have you got?

This isn't the sort of book you breeze through. Rather, you burrow in, holding onto the literary straps as it twists and turns and surveys an unconventional (to say the least) life.

Ostensibly, Until I Find You is the story of Alice, the daughter of a respected Edinburgh tattoo artist, and her 4-year-old son, Jack. Having learned the trade from her father, Alice roams from one North Sea port to the next, earning her living by tattooing all who ask. She's actually searching for Jack's father, William, a church organist who got her pregnant, then fled his "responsibilities." William is an ink junkie. Where there is a celebrated tattoo parlor, he'll eventually turn up.

Alice eventually tracks him to Toronto, where she enrolls Jack at St. Hilda's, a staid, all-girls school which has opened its doors for the first time to elementary-age boys. For the next few years Jack becomes the object of curiosity, lust and emotional battery by upper-level girls, including the wealthy Emma Oastler.

She's the first female to rock him to sleep while holding his penis.

As Jack grows older - prep school at Redding and Exeter - his mother moves into the Oastler mansion and becomes lovers with Emma's divorced mother, Leslie. (An earlier altercation between Alice and Mrs. Oastler about their kids' relationship turns into an unlikely friendship.) When Jack asks why Alice no longer looks for his father, her evasive answers form a wall between mother and son almost as impenetrable as the whereabouts of his father. She becomes a keeper of secrets.

Jack's lifelong dream is to become an actor and, with Emma's help (she analyzes scripts for Hollywood studios), he succeeds. Trouble is, Jack's most famous roles have him playing a cross-dressing psychopath or a cross-dressing tour guide. Androgyny becomes his claim to fame.

Of course, that's only on-screen. Off camera Jack is a love machine, perpetually attracted to older women (not necessarily pretty ones). Having been seduced by a 40-year-old baby sitter at age 10, the older-woman complex becomes his fetish for life.

Yet despite all the sex and fame, Jack's haunted by his lack of a past. Who is his father? Why did he abandon them? What will it take to make Jack feel whole?

Irving spends the last 500 pages of this book supplying the answers, often in his proto-Dickensian way. That is to say, he meanders, weaving dozens of peripheral stories into the plot and gorging us on the details. Some of this material will be familiar to anyone who's read a John Irving novel: wrestling, prep school, Amsterdam's red-light district.

The Hollywood material seems freshest, perhaps because Irving won an Oscar for adapting The Cider House Rules a few years ago and knows the territory firsthand.

While Jack is only half as developed as, say, Homer Wells - even at twice the length of a normal novel - this opacity mostly works to his advantage. We find ourselves empathizing with his idiosyncrasies. As Irving writes at one point: "Jack couldn't really see himself, only his effect on others."

Irving is known for writing positive female characters. Not Alice. She's a woman who wants the best for her child - and willingly lies about how she got it. It's a nice change of pace from Irving's usual strong "saints."

Until I Find You is like a Chinese puzzle box, with layers, trap doors and lots of surprises. It can seem overwhelming at times - Irving loves to double back on his story or introduce characters who take center stage for 30 pages, then disappear for the next 100 - yet you remember them all. His writing, as usual, ranges from wry to funny to bruising melancholy. He doesn't just turn phrases; he upends them.

And you learn a lot here, especially about the art of tattooing, the people who get tattooed, the history of the trade and its trappings. Irving also offers insight into Europe's great pipe organs. As Alice and Jack pursue William around Europe, they visit churches where he's played and gotten into trouble with some woman.

In the end, of course, Until I Find You is about one man's journey to find himself. That means Jack eventually reconciles the life he has with the life he imagines he's lost. It's not an especially happy book - people die, get betrayed and betray themselves - yet it feels true. It feels like life as we could imagine it.

It also feels topical, especially the child molestation subplot. Irving didn't shy away from the subject of incest in The Hotel New Hampshire, so he's not about to pull any punches here. Jack's early sexual experiences fuel the man he will become, and his memories of that early abuse pulsate like a scar that's never quite healed.

No John Irving novel is any easy read; he'd rather take the long way home than the easy path. Yet it's always an unpredictable journey, and once you emerge from the emotional briar patch, you find yourself sad that it's over, and ready to take the trip again.

Mike Pearson is features editor. pearsonm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2592