In Search of Dad
JENSEN, PRISCILLA M.
In Search of Dad A big, fat, heavily italicized new novel from John Irving. BY PRISCILLA M. JENSEN John Irving's fans—and apparently they are legion—won't be disappointed in his newest opus,...
...Although [Jack] didn't know it, a pattern had begun...
...Sexually explicit tattoos, for example, are a recurrent symbolic motif...
...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...
...BY PRISCILLA M. JENSEN John Irving's fans—and apparently they are legion—won't be disappointed in his newest opus, Until I Find You, which at 800-plus pages will add a certain gravitas to the goofiest-looking/most frivolous beach bag...
...Irving has objected when people take note of the frequent bizarreries in his work, saying that real lives are full of bizarre incidents...
...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 Priscilla M. Jensen is a writer in northern Virginia...
...We're told about his life as one of the first day boys at the formerly allgirls St...
...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...
...Then that he "liked Goethe but he loved Rilke," and not least that he "liked Claudia but he loved her car...
...In fact, its sexual imagery is the novel's most effective illumination of the action...
...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...
...We accompany him to prep schools in New England where he excels in wrestling and in the acting he'd begun at St...
...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 longest-lived "marriage" is a lesbian one...
...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...
...His specialty is in playing girls—Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch...
...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...
...when he doesn't appear she finally concedes defeat and returns to Canada...
...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...
...The older girls at St...
...Everywhere he seems to have seduced and abandoned a choir-girl or two...
...He goes off to college in New Hampshire and meets his first real girlfriend, Claudia...
...For all the struggles asserted on his behalf, Jack Burns's journey toward manhood remains incomplete...
...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...
...Jack's alienation and passivity are indicated in his attraction to older women and a preference for incomplete sexual activity...
...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...
...It isn't picaresque or comic—it's rarely pleasurable, even...
...thus, the failure of seriousness that undermines John Irving...
...In justice, it must be said that the plot description above is incomplete to the point of reductionism...
...Hilda's School, where he meets the older and faintly mustachioed Emma Oastler, who'll be his tormentor, protector, muse, friend for life...
...ISO ads charge by the word...
...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...
...Jack discovers the cinema on visits with Emma...
...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...
...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...
...Machado is the final blow to his naiveté, if not entirely to his innocence...
...For the unconverted, though, it also offers fertile ground to examine the received wisdom that the Serious American Reader is obliged to regard Irving as a Serious American Novelist...
...Both these experiences reinforce his immaturity and his passivity...
...Hilda's...
...It seems to have nothing to do with love or even affection...
...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...
...But the classic conclusion is the protagonist's achievement of a mature self-awareness that leads to his forming bonds to the larger community...
...If, "in talking about the past, we lie with every breath," how can a novelist get at larger truths...
...So he signals the reader to be wary of what he's told...
...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...
...Hilda's play a literally manipulative game of doctor, and his molestation at the hands (and other parts) of the frightening housekeeper Mrs...
...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...
...from Copenhagen to Helsinki to Amsterdam...
...And we've reached page 325 or thereabouts...
...In his childhood he is a victim of sexual abuse...
...As he would discover again, later in his life, Jack found that it can be a dark and lonely place backstage...
...if it's to fling in a sure-fire frisson, it's a cheap trick...
...There are many adven-tures—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...
...As the reviewer would learn in early life, it's enough to give you a migraine...
...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...
...everywhere Alice pursues him by tracking down his circle of acquaintances, offering the occasional free tattoo for information on his whereabouts...
...her English was only okay...
...Irving has anticipated a critical outcry from the "good taste police" about the considerable sexual content of Until I Find You...
...And on the next page, "As Jack would discover, it's remarkable how you can miss people you barely knew...
...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...
...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...
...Indeed, as we've seen, they're his stock in trade...
...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...
...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...
...The parlor game of "find the wrestler"—pace Irving's notorious reuse of favorite motifs from novel to novel— again proves satisfying, sort of like the insider's Nina hunt in a Hirschfeld caricature...
...But we're also alerted to the pitfalls created by other betray-als—of false rosy memory, incomplete memory, memory made and changed by acting or storytelling...
...Jack and Claudia both play Kit Kat Girls in summer stock of Cabaret . . . and on and on...
...But it comes to pass precisely because of Irv-ing's evident inability to resist telling us everything he knows about Jack Burns, and then some...
...We're told, for example, that in his college years, "Jack liked Truffaut but he loved Bergman...
...Thus, the remaining hurdles for earnest Jack Burns...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...If this "pedo-sexual" motif is reiterated for serious reasons, its morbidness is deeply distressing...
...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...
Vol. 10 • August 2005 • No. 44
