What, we must ask at this advanced stage in his career, is the deal with John Irving? Wildly inventive and staunchly old-fashioned, hugely popular and undeniably literary, eager to grapple with taboo but achingly humane, mixer of high comedy and ghastly tragedy, Irving assigns himself death-defying authorial tasks and most of the time runs the table.
Until I Find You is not one of those times. It's a pretty good 300-page novel hiding inside a not-very-good 800-plus page one. One wishes his editor would have said something, anything. "This book is 100,000 words too long" comes to mind.
Longtime fans will find much that is comfortably familiar as they settle in here -- European locales, deviant sex, absent parents, physical disfigurement, a fatal traffic accident, much of the action taking place in an exotic land mass to our immediate north known as "Canada." Our protagonist is Jack Burns, who is but a wee lad of 4 when we first meet. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist who's been knocked up by one William, to whose charms the majority of Ontario's females have similarly succumbed. Womanizing cad that he is, William has fled the country and his responsibilities, and headed for Europe to continue his project of getting music tattooed all over his body. Yes you read that right.
So the first 125 pages are Alice and Jack schlepping around Northern European seaports and tattoo parlors in search of William. Then Alice enrolls the boy at a private school named St. Hilda's, where he will be "safe among the girls." Not so much. The real St. Hilda, despite her having been dead since 680 A.D., is going to be plenty mad when she finds out what Irving has going on at a school named for her: Older girls -- most notably a teenage student named Emma Oastler -- molest Jack beginning when he's eight.
Jack's sexual confusion is further exacerbated by the fact that, because he is beautiful and sure to be a ladykiller like his father, he is repeatedly pressed into class dramatic adaptations of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Scarlet Letter Jane Eyre and the like -- in drag.
Let us not spend time doing much Freudian spelunking on this; it's sufficient to note that Jack becomes a Hollywood actor, frequently playing a man playing a woman, and that when he is nominated for an Oscar his teacher from St. Hilda's who made him wear dresses will be his date.
Alice, meanwhile, abruptly gives up her search for Jack's father and overcomes her outrage that Emma Oastler is molesting her 8-year-old son by entering into a long lesbian relationship with Emma's mother.
OK. Assuming that Irving's vast and devoted readership can stomach repeated scenes of child sexual abuse -- and the Long National Nightmare that was the Michael Jackson trial has surely inured us somewhat to that -- all of this at least has potential. The flaw, and it is a fatal one, is that Jack has been robbed of more than his innocence, he's been robbed of his interestingness. For all the horrific psychological damage sexual abuse can cause, I never knew it had the capacity to make its victims dull
But Jack is. About two pounds into the book, Irving hauls Jack to a psychiatrist who, intentionally or not, gives voice to the reader's frustrations: Jack acts in movies, goes to the gym and has sex with women. And that's pretty much it. He has no friends, takes no vacations, has never voted, has no hobbies or quirks. For all the awful things that have happened to him, he is passive to a baffling degree. And unless I'm misreading this badly, defining Jack by what he isn't and doesn't do is Irving's point.
"Have you considered, Jack," the shrink asks, "that what you crave most of all is a real relationship and a normal life, but you don't know anyone who's normal or real?"
"Yes, I have considered that," he answers.
And have you considered, John Irving, at long last arriving at the point of the story of this very boring man already? Well, we're closing in on the 500-page mark -- just getting warmed up! -- and getting there. Eventually, Jack discovers that Alice was a big fat liar, and that Nothing Was As It Seemed.
As in Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, only without horses, Irving then sends his protagonist to retrace his footsteps, albeit this time as an adult, in search of tattooed William. And as the trail leading to Jack's father gets warmer, the book gets better and better.
The climax is a timber-rattling triumph, as good as anything Irving's done. Though, given the slog to get there, you may feel like you've fed US$100 into a slot machine and gotten a nickel back.
It must be said that there are precious few actual funny bits in "Until I Find You." Admittedly, the whole molestation thing isn't a laugh riot on its face, but Irving has built a career largely on exploring the lighter side of incest, amputation and violent death. And Irving's gift for lyrical phrasemaking is largely absent; I flagged with a Post-It exactly one sentence for being simply an exceptionally nice piece of writing: "The distinguished-looking older man in Dr. Garcia's family photographs had a air of detachment about him, as if he were withdrawing from a recurrent argument before it
started."
Such are the perils of swinging for the fences. Irving has had spectacular success (The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, A Widow for One Year) and taxing and tedious failures (A Son of the Circus, The Fourth Hand and, obviously, the novel we're discussing here). The man has never lacked for ambition, and his baroque fictions can only be told the way he tells them -- which is why John Irving books tend to make lousy and sometimes unrecognizable movies. Next time, though, just a few words of advice. Cut to the chase!
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built