Synopsis
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. Hilda s, 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...
The New Yorker
Irving’s vast novel recounts the life of an actor as he tries to find the father who abandoned him and to come to terms with the traumas of his youth: a mother who was an itinerant tattoo artist and occasional prostitute, schooling at an all-girls academy where he was tormented by older classmates, sexual molestation at the hands of a woman who had been a kind of nanny. The story gets off to an energetic start as he and his mother scamper through Scandanavian seaports looking for the father, but it quickly becomes bogged down by unnecessary detail. When we finally meet the father, now ailing, we get a clearer impression of his illness and his doctors than of the man himself. This curious absence is all the more disappointing as Irving has said that the novel is based on his own youth, but it’s unfortunately typical of a book in which the main characters seem two-dimensional.