Throughout his three-decade career, John Irving (“The World According to Garp,” “The Fourth Hand”) has unabashedly trumpeted his creative and emotional connection to 19th-century novels in general and Charles Dickens in particular. It’s a piece of artistic honesty that no less a literary light than T.S. Eliot approved of when he wrote in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to dead poets and artists.”
What many critics have failed to notice is that Irving’s novels, with their often insular worlds and leitmotif, owe a large debt to the artistic world of opera. During a recent telephone interview from his home in Vermont, Irving said as much.
“I sometimes think that, operatic as I am, my novels bear some unintended similarities to Wagner’s Ring tetralogy,” says Irving. “I have created a universe with my own rules and prerogatives, and I repeat and repeat and repeat. Those readers who accept my terms learn to swing and sway to the rhythms – not always uncritically.”
While there is bound to be criticism of the new “Until I Find You,” which, at 826 pages, is Irving’s longest novel yet, it most likely will be leveled by critics who don’t understand that Irving’s novels are meant to be fun-house mirror distortions of our world, or by readers too uptight to admit to the occasional bizarre thought or action in their lives. But longtime fans will revel in this five-part, highly dramatic – and often comic – tale of famous actor Jack Burns and his parents, Alice Stronach, a Toronto tattoo artist, and William Burns, a renowned church organist and tattoo addict.
When William apparently abandons his wife and child, Alice goes in search of him, taking young Jack along. Irving devotes the first 120 pages to this year-long search, detailing Alice and Jack’s adventures: living in various northern European cities; working in old, maritime tattoo parlors; meeting a passel of memorable characters. Irving traveled through the very same cities himself, and while researching the art of tattooing, even picked up a couple of tattoos and tried his hand at the craft.
“Yeah, in the course of my research about this I did get tattooed a couple of times,” says Irving. A tattoo on his right forearm represents a wrestling mat. Another, on his left shoulder, is a maple leaf, a sign of affection for his Canadian wife, Janet Turnbull. “And I did learn how to tattoo – in a very rudimentary fashion,” Irving continues. “Very much as I described young Jack as a 4-year-old learning how to do it.”
Asked why he was moved to bring the worlds of tattooing and church organ music together in one book, Irving says, “I liked the idea of Jack as a boy … looking for his father in these two very distinct worlds. It’s hard to hide when you’re involved in worlds that are as identifiable as church music and the tattoo parlor. And I like the complete dichotomy.
“The only reason for bringing these worlds together is that there is an accomplished church organist who is addicted to being tattooed. That and the fact that, in those North Sea ports where maritime tattooing was born – in those ports like Hamburg and Copenhagen and Oslo and Stockholm and all the rest – there is, by coincidence, a great history of church and choir music. It just seemed to me such a rich detail that sort of lay there, waiting to be used.”
Irving also uses some familiar tropes. He digs up some of the usual suspects, such as prostitutes and wrestlers, and has his characters visit some familiar settings, like Vienna and Amsterdam. But it quickly becomes obvious that Irving is tying up the loose ends of another phase in his career. (For longtime readers there are tips of the hat to characters and situations from “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” “The Hotel New Hampshire” and a few other novels, including “Garp.” Like T.S. Garp, a man loses part of an ear to dog – this time in a nightclub.)
But Irving’s attention to detail, such as when he relates how tattoo artists used to make ink from lamp soot and molasses, and his facility with language breathes new life into these revisited territories. And the author quickly moves on to new ground.
After Alice gives up her search, she and Jack come to live in Toronto, where she eventually becomes a well-known tattoo artist and a somewhat absent mother. Having spent his formative years visiting the tattoo parlors and cathedrals of North Sea cities like Edinburgh, Oslo, Copenhagen and Helsinki, and later in the company of older girls and teachers while going to prep and high school in Canada and the U.S., Jack becomes infatuated with older women. It is here that some of the truths and untruths about Jack’s earlier life begin to be stripped away and the mood of what first seems to be a standard Irving bildungsroman takes a darker turn than usual as some of Jack’s acquaintances play on his innocence to the point of abuse.
The mood change is one that Irving readily concedes, saying the writing of this novel “was so draining – emotionally and psychologically.” Part of the reason for that lies in the fact that Irving, like the character of Jack, is a man who was separated from his father early in life. And although past Irving protagonists have shared this fate in one way or another (the father of T.S. Garp dies before he is born; the mother of Johnny Wheelwright in “A Prayer for Owen Meany” refuses to reveal his father’s identity), Jack Burns and John Irving are more closely intermingled.
While writing “Until I Find You,” Irving learned that his mother had been hiding truths about his biological father from him. It was a revelation that led to Irving setting the book aside for a few years while he worked on screenplays and wrote “The Fourth Hand.” When he came back to the project, it was invested with new insight into his feelings about his biological father, a man he had once claimed to have no interest in, and the character of Jack became that much more three-dimensional.
“I feel a lot of emotional and psychological closeness to that character,” Irving admits. That closeness to his protagonist was the main reason Irving decided to switch the novel from first to third-person narration. “All of a sudden I realized how Jack Burns is shaped by his experiences with older women, how his mother’s deceits make him who he is, how his relationship to all women and even to occasionally being a woman, make him overridingly the main character of this novel,” says Irving. “And I had to get out of his voice; I had to step back from it.”
Of course, Irving is quick to point out that using bits of experience from his own life doesn’t mean that “Until I Find You” is autobiographical. Scenes like Jack’s various flirtations with transvestism work simply as another quirky character trait.
One of the older women on whom Jack develops a crush, Emma Oastler, becomes Jack’s best friend, despite his personality quirks. Emma helps Jack hone his skills as an actor, engages in a bit of occasional frottage with him and eventually writes a novel that Jack helps turn into an Oscar-winning screenplay.
Irving also turns Emma into one of his most heartbreaking, fully
realized female characters. It is Emma’s influence, and that of two other characters, that spur Jack to again take up his quest for his father. That quest leads to some more moments of high drama and off-the-wall comedy, and eventually to some final chapters and a denouement quite different from what most readers think of as a usual Irving epilogue.
“In the book’s final chapters,” Irving says, “I wanted the prose to be as softly elegiac and contrastingly loud as an organ in a reverberant church.” Indeed, the whole story will reverberate through readers’ minds long after the cover is closed. And the character of Jack Burns is so strong, so perfectly realized, that he sets a new standard for the author. “Jack may be the most complicated character I’ve done.”
For critics who still hold fast to seeing Irving as the 20th- and 21st-century incarnation of Dickens, “Until I Find You” may turn out to be Irving’s “David Copperfield.” Like Copperfield, Jack is victimized as a child and, recalling the famous first line of that Dickens novel, one of Jack’s professors tells him that his job is “to be a hero among your fellow men.” Furthermore, Irving echoes the concerns in “David Copperfield” when he takes on the loss of a child’s innocence, a theme briefly touched on in “A Widow for One Year,” and the fallibility of childhood memories.
This quote from Chapter 27 sums it all up nicely: “So much of what you think you remember is a lie, the stuff of postcards. The snow untrampled and unspoiled; the Christmas candles in the windows of houses, where the damage to the children is unseen and unheard.”
And for readers who love all the high and low notes, “Until I Find You” is Irving at his operatic finest. There is plenty of the over-the-top melodrama, twisted, out-of-left-field comedy, heartbreaking tragedy and a stouthearted, transcendent hero named Jack Burns at the center of it all.
“Not everyone can feed off sentiment as relentlessly as Wagner and I do,” says Irving, “but one hopes to be appreciated for a grander design and a more carefully ordered universe than the one we actually inhabit! ‘Until I Find You’ is a serious picaresque novel, or I am a serious Romantic – if these aren’t contradictions in terms.”
Dorman T. Shindler, a freelance writer from Missouri, contributes regularly to several national magazines and newspapers.
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Until I Find You
By John Irving
Random House, 826 pages, $27.95
