Sun, Jul 17, 2005 page19

• John Irving takes a turn for the dull

  John Irving's latest book, `Until I Find You,' is handy to keep on the bedside table if you're an insomniac

  • By Patrick Beach / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  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.

  

  Until I Find You By John Irving 824 pages Random House

  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!
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