Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Until I Find You by John Irving in Praise of Older Women

Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Until I Find You by John Irving In praise of older women. Jack Burns is nine when he ejaculates between Penny Hamilton's eyes. It is a formative experience, in many ways. For one, he is still dressed as Darlin' Jenny for his role in the school play. For another, Penny (aged 18) is one of the first in a long line of older women in Jack's life. That Jack's first ejaculation takes place while he is being kissed by Emma (16, and with a faint moustache that Jack finds arousing) adds to his excitement. But the real object of Jack's desire is Penny's sister Bonnie, not just another older girl but a limping older girl. "Her crippling accident drew Jack to her. This was worse than what Emma had correctly identified as his older-woman thing. He was attracted to how Bonnie had been damaged." Sex and damage are very much the themes of John Irving's 11th novel. Until I Find You begins in 1969, with Jack, aged four, travelling the ports of northern Europe with his mother Alice. She is searching for William, Jack's runaway father, an organ player with a reputation for womanising. The search is frustrating. Jack and Alice seem always to be one step behind the elusive William, picking up scraps of information about his exploits with choir-girls and living off Alice's earnings as a tattooist. Jack is often dispatched to solicit customers for his mother. Her most popular tattoos are a Rose of Jericho (a vulva hidden in the flower's petals) and a broken heart: sex and damage etched into the skin. When William will not be found, Alice and Jack head back to Toronto, where Jack starts at St Hilda's, a girls' school in which Jack is among the first male intake. It is Alice's notion that Jack will be safe among the girls. But this line - "Oh, what a lucky boy Jack was! Safe among the girls, without a doubt" - is the dark underside to the sort of quirky tale Irving has made his own. From Jack's first day at school, he is (often literally) taken in hand by older girls. Partly because he has eyelashes to die for and partly because of his father's reputation, "The Big Bet" is on that Jack will be a womaniser, and his "little guy" is treated as a "coming attraction", closely monitored for signs of life. As an extension of his assumed sexual talents, Jack is thrust on stage, usually in the role of a woman. Aged eight, he is Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Anna Karenina. In his 20s, he becomes a Hollywood player thanks to a series of transvestite roles. But the acme of Jack's school acting career is his aforementioned Darlin' Jenny. The Canadian pioneer melodrama A Mail-Order Bride in the North-west Territories provides Jack with the role of a Quebec orphan whose arranged marriage will be consummated only after her first period starts. In a hysterical scene of classic Irving high camp, the performance involves the dramatic on-stage onset of menstruation, the misguided "rescue" of Jack by a Jamaican in the audience ("Jack, you are bleeding, mon!"), all cut through with Jack's puzzlement at seeing his mother in the front row holding hands and playing footsie with a woman. One of Irving's defining traits is his skill for mixing tragedy with comedy, the rough with the smooth, and in Until I Find You he shows no sign of losing that skill. As the novel charts Jack's progress through Maine boarding school and on to Hollywood stardom, there is always a dark shadow hovering over this "lucky boy". Invariably, this shadow takes female form. When he is 10, a divorced Portuguese woman - Jack's wrestling partner - becomes his sexual abuser, robbing Jack of his ability to say no. When he is older, his increasingly cold mother tries to hold Jack back from finding the truth about his father. Irving's previous novels have treated women as beyond reproach, be they saintly mothers (The Hotel New Hampshire, A Prayer for Owen Meany), innocent victims (The Cider House Rules) or tough survivors (A Widow for One Year). But in Until I Find You this compassion seems to be wearing thin. Save for a couple of exceptions, women here are predators, wilful manipulators with the power to do Jack lasting damage. As an unfortunate consequence, Jack makes a limp hero, permanently under the thumb of an older woman. He is an actor, "on-camera for the rest of his life", performing for his imaginary "audience of one" (his absent father). Yet, though Irving often tells us that Jack is lovable, it is hard to feel it. He is without personality, an actor in search of a role, the "you" of the book's title referring as much to Jack himself as to his father. But if Irving can mix the rough with smooth then that is what readers must do, too. So what if Jack isn't a very compelling hero or that the book is a challenging 822 pages, stretching ahead seemingly without end? There are enough stories here to fill at least three normal novels, and no fewer than 117 characters, each one named, fleshed out and with a role to play. There are fantastic evocations of the collective lunacy that takes over people in institutions. And there are more transvestites, prostitutes, wrestlers, bikers, tattooists and cripples than you can shake a jester's stick at. After the slim pickings of The Fourth Hand, Irving's previous novel, Until I Find You is a feast for his fans. Until I Find You — John Irving. 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 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 Jack’s 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 protagonist’s 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 can’t 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 father’s 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 You is also a swaggering comic novel, a giant tapestry of life’s hopes. It is a masterpiece to compare with John Irving’s great novels, and restates the author’s claim to be considered the most glorious, comic, moving novelist at work today. Until I Find You by John Irving. Today on The Tattooed Book I review Until I Find You by John Irving, an award-winning American author and ex-professional wrestler who’s published fourteen novels including The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany . His novel Cider House Rules was adapted into a film of the same name featuring Michael Caine, for which Irving won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Until I Find You came to my attention while I was looking for novels with themes around tattoos. Jack Burns’ earliest memories are of the fall of 1968 and the journey he took across Europe with his mother to hunt down his estranged father. His mother, Alice was a tattooist and his father had left her after she became pregnant. Tracking him through his hobbies as an organist and tattoo collector, Alice managed to track Jack’s father, William, from country to country. Alice was the daughter of a famous tattooist and she had no problem finding work in some of the more reputable tattoo studios of the time, but even when she couldn’t find a studio she would work from whatever hotel room they could afford.

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