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| Until I Find You: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: John Irving
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  253 reviews
Sales Rank: 285165
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st Edition 2005
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 848
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 1400063833
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781400063833
ASIN: 1400063833
Publication Date: July 12, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 248 more reviews...
 Great ! July 12, 2005
115 out of 199 found this review helpful
'Until I Find You' is a great novel after the disappointing 'The Fourth Hand'. Jack Burns is a typical John Irving character: an only child, raised alone by his mother, we follow him through his school years, his wrestling, his 'special' relationships with older and younger women, until he becomes an actor in Hollywood. He is weird of course, some say too weird. His mother is a tattoo artist, his father is an organist (not onanist!).
Jack (four years old) and his mother go on a search in Europe to find his missing father, or are they?
This is a novel about penises, prostitutes and forgiveness.
It is long and some will say overlong (some of the minor characters - tattoo artists, coaches, teachers, girlfriends of Jack - could have been deleted, but like Dickens, Mr Irving likes to show what he can...)
The novel starts with Jack and his mother, and it ends in Zurich with...see for yourself!
I read all the 820 pages of my copy, published in English by the Dutch publisher De Bezige Bij in Amsterdam!
I read my first John Irving 'The world according to Garp' in 1979 when I was a student in Louvain, Belgium. I am now 45 and I still like reading his novels.
'Until I Find You' is without a doubt one of his most satisfying books.
Take your time! It will grow on you!
Not The Irving To Start With August 2, 2005
76 out of 81 found this review helpful
I have to start off by saying John Irving is my favorite living writer. Both 'A Prayer for Owen Meany' and 'The Cider House Rules' are fantastic timeless classics that will secure him as our modern day Dickens. After the disapponting "Fourth Hand" I had high hopes for this book. Yet for the first time with an Irving book I found myself getting bored.
Jack Burns, a famous actor, searches for the father who abandoned he and his mother when he was a small boy. In classic Irving style there are a myriad of colorful characters who populate the novel, but having read everything else he's written, so many themes from previous novels are re-worked (sexual abuse the most dominant)that it feels like Irving is trying to wrestle his own demons and needs to take advice given to Jack and, "Forgive and move on."
However the biggest problem for me was I felt no connection with Jack. For the first time I felt I was reading about someone I couldn't care less about, so any supposed emotional wallop at the end was lost. I never felt there was an Owen or Wilbur in the whole book. Even Emma Oastler,who is one of the novel's best characters, pales in comparison to the very similar Hester Eastman, from Owen Meany.
The book has some great laugh out loud moments, (in particular Jack's attending an all girl school in Toronto),if you can get beyond the strong sexual abuse and misuse that occurs rather frequently in the first 400 pages. Anyone who is a rabid Irving fan will want to read it and judge for themselves, but for a first timer, I'd strongly suggest the two superb novels I mentioned earlier.
 Another Triumph! July 15, 2005
66 out of 79 found this review helpful
I am a loyal fan of Mr. Irving and have read his entire collection of stories over the years. But this book probably should have been edited down to a more reasonable size based on the nature of this particular story. It could have had some more material added and then possibly split into a sequel...
Despite the weighty moroseness and risque portions of the book, which others have described, there are some other aspects of the story I found appealing. I found the minor characters to be very useful in fleshing out the living world around the main character and though some might think the number to be excessive, I think it actually helped.
Also, the masterful usage of flashbacks and a certain prevailing sincerity of conviction in telling the tale over all, kept me reading its 800+ pages.
It's a fine addition to his body of work and I eagerly await the next.
Also recommended, Anna's Trinity by Howard Cobiskey.
Until I Find You is a difficult book to like . . . September 23, 2006
49 out of 51 found this review helpful
... although it doesn't start that way.
The story of Jack Burns begins comically with his mother's search for the man who loved and left her, told from the 4-year old Jack's point of view as he follows his mother across the port cities of North Europe. Along the way we meet a cast of characters that rival some of the finest Irving has yet created, a collection of tattoo artists, seamen, prostitutes, and church organists that make these chapters the best of the book.
But all is not as it seems. The middle third of the novel opens with Jack entering a girl's private boarding school, one that accepts a limited number of male students in the lower grades. It also opens with the near disappearance of Jack's mother. The two live under the same roof, but Jack is largely looked after by surrogate caretakers. Having never known his father, Jack now loses his mother. While this second section begins with the comic tone of the first, it takes a more serious turn as Irving presents Jack's sexual abuse by both older female students and by a middle-aged woman. Some readers have been upset that Irving has not portrayed the abuse in darker shades. But as the story is told from a child's point of view, Irving's depiction of Jack's acquiescence seems entirely plausible. Children, after all, seek most to be loved, a desire also primary to adults but tempered in the latter by the courage and ability to say "no," to deny others to protect themselves. Lacking this ability, some children grow up to be adult victims of abuse. And to some degree, this is Jack's story, a pretty boy abandoned by his parents who grows into a handsome man who in his search for love can't say "no" to the many women who wish to bed him.
Without a home, without a father or mother, Jack enters adulthood in the third and final section of the novel. Irving traces his rise to stardom as an actor specializing in cross-gender roles and his slow undressing of the soul as Jack learns from his dying mother that his father is not the scoundrel his mother once made him out to be. Setting off in search of his real father, Jack begins at last a search for his real self, buried for so long under the desire to please others, carefully concealed under the actor's persona. The problem for Irving in this last section is sustaining the reader's interest in a character afraid to make important decisions, an actor afraid of commitment, a character without character.
But for those who do stay with Irving through the end, there is a satisfying emotional payoff, though perhaps not enough to justify the 900-page build-up. Many of the supporting characters are well-drawn (and often more interesting than Jack) and there are a satisfying number of passages full of Irving humor, but the prose often seems flat, with very few stand-out passages. In fact I found only one sentence underlined after finishing the novel. Apparently the original manuscript was composed in the first person, then completely rewritten after Irving made his own discoveries about his missing father and decided the novel was too autobiographical to issue as written.
This was not my favorite Irving novel, but neither did I find it his worst. For those who have read Irving over the years, this will most likely be a satisfying read, but Until I Find You is probably not the best place for new Irving readers to begin.
It's' a Comic Novel ... and a Doorstop! July 20, 2005
21 out of 42 found this review helpful
Irving, a self-described comic novelist, has produced a comic novel with a lot of weight--in more ways than one. Yes, Until I Find You is long, and there are times (and reasons) why the novel seems a bit of a slog in places, but Irving's new novel also contains much that is good about Irving's better works. For one thing, it's more like The World According to Garp than any of his other novels, and Garp is what put Irving on the map as an author. The novel's main character, Jack Burns, is a fascinating and sympathetic character as a child--but the middle portion of the book suffers somewhat as Jack is not all that sympathetic as an up-and-coming movie actor. On the other hand, Irving's take on life in Hollywood redeems this section of the book, even as the reader works to get through it in order to get to Jack's redemption as a human being.
Central to the novel's theme is the fallibility of memory, and how it shapes who we are as a person. Additionally, much of Jack's personality is shaped by his absent father, who Jack believes has abandoned him, the sexual abuse Jack endures as a child, and his subsequent inability to have a "normal" relationship with women as an adult. Irving, who never knew his father and who was also a victim of sexual abuse as a child, is clearly exorcising some demons here.
There are fewer set comic pieces than in most Irving novels, but when they arrive, they are likely as not to make the reader laugh out loud. As always, Irving's penchant for exhaustive research pays off--when the novel immerses itself in descriptions of the North Sea tattoo tradition as well as european religious organ music, the reader is treated to a wonderful introduction to both subjects.
Anyone who is a fan of Irving's earlier work will enjoy this book--Jack Burns is a classic Irving character, and the plot of the novel, which Irving has stated is his most autobiographical to date, makes for a great read.
Until I Met You is Irving's best book since A Prayer for Owen Meany, which happens to be my personal favorite among Irving's novels.
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