In Search of Dad

Like a number of Irving’s previous novels, Until I Find You is a Bildungsroman, the tale of protagonist Jack Burns’s self-discovery from the age of four almost to middle age, and we’re hardly spared a day of it. The narrative offers Irving’s trademark baroque smorgasbord of detail and episode, beginning with fatherless Jack’s childhood search, with his tattoo-artist mother Alice, through the skinpots of northern Europe for his father William, a church organist and “ink addict”–unable to control his mania for having sheet music tattooed all over. They’d met when Alice was in a church choir and before you could say “Buxtehude” she was pregnant and William off to Canada, always one jump ahead of her.

Now he’s reported to be in Scandinavia, and Alice drags Jack around the Baltic, working in tattoo parlors and inquiring after his father at churches from Copenhagen to Helsinki to Amsterdam. Everywhere he seems to have seduced and abandoned a choirgirl or two; everywhere Alice pursues him by tracking down his circle of acquaintances, offering the occasional free tattoo for information on his whereabouts. There are many adventures–in Copenhagen, Jack falls through canal ice near an old fort and is rescued by a tiny man he thinks of as “the littlest soldier,” who later receives a tattoo as a reward. In Amsterdam, Alice poses briefly as a prostitute in the famous red-light district because she’s heard that William is to be found there; when he doesn’t appear she finally concedes defeat and returns to Canada.

Not only, dear reader, is this not the half of what happens on the European quest–or what we’re told happens–it isn’t a fifth part of what happens to Jack in Until I Find You.

We’re told about his life as one of the first day boys at the formerly all-girls St. Hilda’s School, where he meets the older and faintly mustachioed Emma Oastler, who’ll be his tormentor, protector, muse, friend for life. We accompany him to prep schools in New England where he excels in wrestling and in the acting he’d begun at St. Hilda’s. (His specialty is in playing girls–Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch.) Jack discovers the cinema on visits with Emma. He goes off to college in New Hampshire and meets his first real girlfriend, Claudia. Jack and Claudia both play Kit Kat Girls in summer stock of Cabaret . . . and on and on. And we’ve reached page 325 or thereabouts.

In justice, it must be said that the plot description above is incomplete to the point of reductionism. But it comes to pass precisely because of Irving’s evident inability to resist telling us everything he knows about Jack Burns, and then some. We see every episode of Jack’s life, strung out serially like beads on a cord, with the same amount of space allocated for BBs as for pearls.

The problems this causes are much exacerbated by the intrusion throughout Until I Find You of a peculiar narrative voice, much given to creaky exposition, portentous foreshadowing, and snappy asides, and perpetrator of some of the lumpiest prose it’s been my lot to encounter. “Although [Jack] didn’t know it, a pattern had begun.” “As he would discover again, later in his life, Jack found that it can be a dark and lonely place backstage.” And on the next page, “As Jack would discover, it’s remarkable how you can miss people you barely knew.”

There’s a lot of emphasis in italics–“if these weren’t truly her last words to him,” “a first reader meant an only reader,” “[she] wasn’t that well-spoken; her English was only okay.” As the reviewer would learn in early life, it’s enough to give you a migraine. (Note: The reviewer has also learned that Irving changed the novel’s voice from first to third person fairly late in the game, which may have a great deal to do with its stylistic shortcomings.)

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the effect of this avalanche of information, and the narrator’s frequent two cents’ worth, is that Jack Burns’s story comes across as recited rather than shown. We’re told, for example, that in his college years, “Jack liked Truffaut but he loved Bergman.” Then that he “liked Goethe but he loved Rilke,” and not least that he “liked Claudia but he loved her car.” Within 11 pages, we’ve at least been filled in that he feels more strongly about cinema and transportation than about poetry, but it comes across with all the conviction of an ISO ad, and with greater redundancy. (ISO ads charge by the word.)

These failures of style and the sheer longueurs of Until I Find You are unfortunate, for they interfere with exploring the novel’s more serious intentions. It takes stamina to stick with Jack (through his Hollywood career in transvestite roles, his transition to screenwriting after Emma’s death, his Academy Award) long enough to see him through to the conclusion.

In the epigraph, Irving announces his concern with memory as a “form of storytelling”–drawn on, perhaps, as a way of making life “acceptable,” even though “in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.” So he signals the reader to be wary of what he’s told. We learn that Jack discovers that almost anything his mother has said about his father is a lie, that he didn’t simply abandon his son, and that Alice has taken her revenge in a series of cruelties her son could not have imagined. But we’re also alerted to the pitfalls created by other betrayals–of false rosy memory, incomplete memory, memory made and changed by acting or storytelling.

If, “in talking about the past, we lie with every breath,” how can a novelist get at larger truths? Irving invites the reader to consider what truth might emerge from Jack’s synthesis of his own experience, or from the reader’s weighing everything he encounters in Jack’s story. But if Jack Burns is literally an actor, as his mother claimed early in his life, and as his career demonstrates, he is much more profoundly an actee–someone to whom things happen. In his childhood he is a victim of sexual abuse. The older girls at St. Hilda’s play a literally manipulative game of doctor, and his molestation at the hands (and other parts) of the frightening housekeeper Mrs. Machado is the final blow to his naiveté, if not entirely to his innocence. Both these experiences reinforce his immaturity and his passivity.

Irving has anticipated a critical outcry from the “good taste police” about the considerable sexual content of Until I Find You. Sexually explicit tattoos, for example, are a recurrent symbolic motif. The longest-lived “marriage” is a lesbian one. Jack’s alienation and passivity are indicated in his attraction to older women and a preference for incomplete sexual activity. In fact, its sexual imagery is the novel’s most effective illumination of the action.

My considerable unease with it stems from knowing that sexually predatory behavior by women and girls toward boys and young men is one of Irving’s leitmotifs–a morbid and depressing one. It isn’t picaresque or comic–it’s rarely pleasurable, even. It seems to have nothing to do with love or even affection. Irving has objected when people take note of the frequent bizarreries in his work, saying that real lives are full of bizarre incidents. If this “pedo-sexual” motif is reiterated for serious reasons, its morbidness is deeply distressing; if it’s to fling in a sure-fire frisson, it’s a cheap trick.

But Jack’s on-again, off-again search for his father, and what he is able to understand when he finds him, even more conclusively demonstrate the incompleteness of Until I Find You as Bildungsroman. Irving certainly knows the elements of the form–the fatherless hero, the elements of autobiography, a movement from the home of childhood toward the larger world. Indeed, as we’ve seen, they’re his stock in trade. But the classic conclusion is the protagonist’s achievement of a mature self-awareness that leads to his forming bonds to the larger community.

For all the struggles asserted on his behalf, Jack Burns’s journey toward manhood remains incomplete. He does, indeed, find his marvelously decorated father, ecstatically mad but the embodiment of a joyful lovingness that has been absent from Jack’s experience. Though Jack gladly accepts responsibility for his father, and begins a relationship with his newly discovered sister, these steps toward attachment are tentative and anticlimactic because they remain so self-referential. Attachment to family, however necessary, is not the same as a mature relationship to the larger world, and it remains unclear whether Jack will be able to expand his horizons.

There’s a clue to the nature of this incompleteness in Irving’s “motif game,” which is doubly self-referential in its use of autobiography and of borrowings from his previous work. These mirror tricks may glitter, but they make it far more difficult to convey depth and dimension, and Irving’s preoccupation with himself and his whimsies becomes a self-indulgence which borders on facetiousness. Thus, the remaining hurdles for earnest Jack Burns; thus, the failure of seriousness that undermines John Irving.

Priscilla M. Jensen is a writer in northern Virginia.