Until I Find You: A Novel

About this book

Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns his life loves celebrity and astonishing search for the truth about his parents. When he is four years old Jack travels with his mother Alice a tattoo artist to several North Sea ports in search of his father William Burns. From Copenhagen to Amsterdam William a brilliant church organist and profligate womanizer is always a step ahead has always just departed in a wave of scandal with a new tattoo somewhere on his body from a local master or scratcher. Alice and Jack abandon their quest and Jack is educated at schools in Canada and New England including tellingly a girls school in Toronto. His real education consists of his relationships with older women from Emma Oastler who initiates him into erotic life to the girls of St. Hildas with whom he first appears on stage to the abusive Mrs. Machado whom he first meets when sent to learn wrestling at a local gym. Too much happens in this expansive eventful novel to possibly summarize it all. Emma and Jack move to Los Angeles where Emma becomes a successful novelist and Jack a promising actor. A host of eccentric minor characters memorably come and go including Jacks hilariously confused teacher the Wurtz; Michelle Maher the girlfriend he will never forget; and a precocious child Jack finds in the back of an Audi in a restaurant parking lot. We learn about tattoo addiction and movie cross-dressing sleeping in the needles and the cure for cauliflower ears. And John Irving renders his protagonists unusual rise through Hollywood with the same vivid detail and range of emotions he gives to the organ music Jack hears as a child in European churches. This is an absorbing and moving book about obsession and loss truth and storytelling the signs we carry on us and inside us the traces we cant get rid of. Jack has always lived in the shadow of his absent father. But as he grows older and when his mother dies he starts to doubt the portrait of his fathers character she painted for him when he was a child. This is the cue for a second journey around Europe in search of his father from Edinburgh to Switzerland towards a conclusion of great emotional force. A melancholy tale of deception Until I Find Youis also a swaggering comic novel a giant tapestry of lifes hopes. It is a masterpiece to compare with John Irvings great novels and restates the authors claim to be considered the most glorious comic moving novelist at work today. From the Hardcover edition.