Until I Find You John Irving

Description

John Irvings eleventh novel, Until I Find You, is the story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to several Baltic and North Sea ports. They are trying to find Jacks missing father, William, a church organist who is addicted to being tattooed. But Alice is a mystery, and William cant be found. Even Jacks memories are subject to doubt.

Jack Burns is educated at schools in Canada and New England, but he is shaped by his relationships with older women. Mr. Irving renders Jacks life as an actor in Hollywood with the same richness of detail and range of emotions he uses to describe the tattoo parlors in those Baltic and North Sea ports and the reverberating music Jack heard as a child in European churches.

The narrative voice of this novel is melancholic. Until I Find You is suffused with overwhelming sadness and deception. It is also a robust and comic novel, certain to be compared to Mr. Irvings most ambitious and moving work.