This book is either the culmination of John Irving's life's work of the result of a bar bet. Those are the only two explanations I can come up with for a book where the protagonist is 4 years old at the start and yet the word "penis" is used at least once on every page. This book really should be called, "I Love My Penis" because that is the driving theme of every chapter.

This should not come as a shock to anyone who has read anything written by John Irving before but the degree of passion for the body part and the word itself has never reached such dizzying heights as it does here.

Irving has also reached new heights of hating women and portraying them in a boundless array of unflattering roles. The mother/prostitute is nothing new but the overweight, penis-holding sister/lover with the broken vagina is a new addition to the pantheon.

Having read this book, I believe I will stop reading any more Irving and hang on to the memories of the older novels I enjoyed.

I did not care for this book and I do not recommend it. I am struggling with whether to put it in a neighborhood free library because I would hate to subject anyone else to it. There is so much minutia and so much trauma and inappropriate behavior. I picked it while I was on vaca because I had already finished the one book that I had brought with me and I had heard generally decent things about Irving. I'm glad it's done and I probably should have stopped reading much, much earlier.

Life is too short. I can't handle this book for one more page. I made it to page 148. And I'm just sickened. It gets two stars since I just can't bring myself to give it any more chances, and maybe it gets better. But in a quest looking for spoilers, I found that the things that bother me so only get worse. I love other work by John Irving. This is just dreadful, though. I decided after sticking through Bleak House (Dickens) that I would be okay with book abandonment. I won't do it often. I have never willingly abandoned a book I started for pleasure. I hope to not have to again. But, as previously stated, life is too short. Goodbye tedious, disgusting book. (P.S. If a book is going to have child molestation in it, it should NOT be written like an everyday/normal occurrence.)

Read in 2008. It took me a long time to find her at 800 pages. An absorbing and moving book about obsession and loss. A literary giant.

I'll admit that I'm only 3/4 through this book but it's so ridiculous that I feel confident that I can review it at this point. It seems like the editor should have done a word count for the word penis. I mean really how many times can Irving say that some women was holding Jack's penis? and how many women are really hot about an 8 year old? Seems like a male fantasy story. All women want this guy starting at the age of 4 and all through his life women can't wait to see, touch and/or climb on his penis. All the women in the book are sex obsessed and always horny. Really? and his mother tells him to have sex with her lesbian lover? I think Irving should have just written a trashy porn movie and got it out of his system. This book is embarrassing and it's absurd that he dedicates the book to his young son. I really hope his son never reads it. If my father had written this I would change my name.
Ugh.

I suspect that once you’ve reached a certain level of fame, publishers simply stop editing you. After all, whatever you write is destined to sell. Why rock the boat? It’s clear that John Irving has reached that level. He’s a great storyteller, and his characters are vibrant and interesting, but boy, is his latest novel, Until I Find You, in need of a decent edit.

The book presents a decent story which pivots around Jack Burns, a young actor and inevitable ladies man who spends his life unraveling the memories of his childhood. Irving cleverly presents us with a story in the first half which is presented as Jack Burn’s childhood. It begins in 1969 with Jack and his mother Alice searching for his runaway father, the organist and tattoo junkie William Burns. The chase is entertaining enough as Alice and Jack go on a grand adventure which takes them through the brothels of Europe, tattoo parlours, and cafes. Jack’s naïve perspective on the sometimes wild goings on is both charming and indicative of his later personality as he forms his own brand of understanding of the tawdry situation his mother puts him in:

"A prostitute, Jack’s mom told him, was a woman who gave advice to men who had difficulty understanding women in general—or one woman, such as a wife, in particular. The reason the men looked ashamed of themselves was that they knew they should really be having such an important and personal conversation with their wives or girlfriends, but they were inexplicably unable or unwilling to do so. They were “blocked,” Alice said. Woman were a mystery to them; they could pour out their hearts only to strangers, for a price." (105)

Although they remain close, they don’t find William, and go back to Toronto so Jack can get an education at an all girls’ school. As you might expect, his education is rather more extensive than a mother might like, and as his father’s reputation has preceded him, Jack follows in his footsteps as he is regularly abused, coddled, and mentored into a combination of acting genius famous for his transvestite roles, and compulsive womanizer. As Jack ages, the plot line moves forward through Jack’s almost accidental stardom, his long time friend Emma’s fame as a writer, and above all, Jack’s desire to find his father, and discover himself. All that is good, and there is much here to applaud, from the rich settings that Jack traverses, the well researched sense of place, the funky exploration of the world of tattooing and the interesting melding of the delicate with the rough. The book is populated with interesting damaged characters from Jack’s mother Daughter Alice, the delicate Miss Wurtz at Jack’s school to a host of dodgy and damaged tattoo artists, porn stars, wrestlers, crazy actresses, psychiatrists, a pregnant aerobics instructor and a few famous actors.
It’s a great first draft. But there is so much extraneous material here. From the start of Jack’s education, there’s a continuum of catalogue-like name dropping that is beyond tedious. The reader just doesn’t need to have a complete synopsis of the play Jack puts on at St Hilda’s school, "Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories":

"in the rugged Northweest Territories, where men aare men and women are scarce, a pioneer community of fur trappers and women are scarce, a pioneer community of fur trappers and ice fishermen sends a sizable amount of money, “for traveling expenses,” to a mail-order service called Brides Back East. The poor brides are chosen from among unadoptable orphanes in Quebec; many of them don’t speak English…(242)"

The previous quote goes on for 3 full paragraphs, but I won’t do to you what Irving does to his readers (besides, my editors aren’t afraid to edit me). There are many other ‘besides-the-point’ passages of material that Irving clearly couldn’t bear to remove even though it is completely extraneous to the plot and characters. From the complete plotline of Blade Runner, to a catalogue of Oscars won in various years, overviews of what various film stars were wearing at a number of both fictional and real events, the films Jack saw (complete with multi-paragraphed plotlines), to the complete story (so detailed as to be a story itself) of one of each of Jack’s films; Irving spares his readers nothing:

"Jack-as-Melody promptly dumps Pure Innocence and goes solo. By ’69, Melody’s albums have gone gold and platinum and triple-platinum. She returns to being a blues singers with her last hit single, “Bad Bill Is Gone,” an ode to an abusive ex-boyfriend-the former lead guitarist in Pure Innocence, whom the tabloids allege Melody once tried to kill by lacing his favourite marijuana lasagne with rat poison. (449)"

The above passage which explicates one of Jack’s films goes on for three (count em’) pages. It’s basically skip over material, and wouldn’t be a major problem if the book wasn’t so full of this stuff, and if this didn’t detract from both the story and the underlying theme of growth, deception, damage and healing promised by lines like: “In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us—not always in one momentous event, but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss. (496) However, both Jack’s character, which never really emerges beyond description—the reader is never let in—and Jack’s story are all submerged into the non-stop, tedious and sensationalised machinations of Jack’s “little guy”. Until I Find You never really achieves its promise, partly because it is so weighed down with irrelevancy, and the reader is therefore unable to give Jack the sympathy that such a myopically presented character deserves as he moves from 1969 to 2000.

Clearly John Irving is a talented writer, whose extensive research is matched by his extensive knowledge. It’s just a shame he doesn’t have a trusted editor willing to insist that Irving cut the ridiculous quantity of fluff out of his latest tome. Jack is “a writer, , albeit one given to melancholic logorrhoea. A storyteller, if only out loud.” (699). The same could be said for Until I find You. The book simply doesn’t realise its potential, either in terms of its characters or the force of its plot. Melancholic logorrhoea is an excellent description.

Super well researched and also hard to go wrong with a book about tattoos, classical music, Nova Scotia, Hollywood, Bob Dylan, weird family dynamics, etc.

I did not finish this book. When I came to the pedophile, I could not with good conscience continue.

Foarte interesantã ideea de bazã, jumi-juma total opuse. Hmmmm, s-a "jucat" dl. Irving niţel cu mintea noastrã...

What a shame when a decent story idea is mangled by diarrhea writing and non-existent editing. I plowed through all 800-some pages of this book, hoping that Irving would somehow redeem himself in the end. No such luck. It managed to even get worse at the end - quite a feat. This book was a real disappointment, and I give it two stars only because the basic story itself was intriguing; it was the execution of the story that fell far short.

The blurb on the back of this book sounded OK so I bought it. Big fat book, but most of Irving's tend to be. Unfortunately this should have been much shorter IMO - so much of it seems to repeat the same themes over and over, and whilst some scenes are comical (the doctors' conflab for example) they go on and on, like a Catherine Tate sketch, long after they have ceased to be funny. There was a story in here trying to get out and it was being smothered. Perhaps the worst bit was the middle section which had Emma in it. I swear if she had called Jack 'Baby Cakes' one more time my head would have exploded. And was it just me that found the older girls' obsession with Jack's tackle a bit icky? And don't get me started on the wrestling. Please.....no more wrestling!!

This is my first experience reading Irving. All I can say is that whereas I find the style of writing very easy to get into and likable, I find the plot horrifying. It's like some kind of accident or wreck- you want to look away but you find yourself unable to do so.

I picked up the book because it said it was the story of how a boy and his mother (a tattoo artist) traveled various North Sea Ports to find his father, a church organist addicted to being tattooed. I went to Newfoundland a few years ago, and have been enraptured with it ever since; in my ignorance, I thought the Maritimes were included in 'North Sea Ports', so I checked it out of the library without reading more.

The beginning was slow, but I immediately liked Irving's style of writing. There were parts I found distasteful, but in a way that I liked, it was so well done. Jack's misunderstandings of several adult situations were written in such a way that an adult reader could understand what was really happening without questioning why Jack would think the way he did.

Most of my dislike of this book comes with Jack's treatment at the hands of the older girls. He is quite obviously molested by several different girls and older women before he is ten, and I find that absolutely horrifying. His innocence and even enjoyment of these 'games' baffles me, but perhaps my confusion stems from the fact I'm not a boy.

Jack is said to be the spitting image of his father, even at four years old, and the fact seems to doom him. Several women tell him to guard against committing the same sins as his father, while some are expecting him to do so. In fact, going to the same school where his father impregnated one girl and slept with another (just to be clear, the girls were not little girls, but older teenagers) seems to seal his fate. The girls (one in particular) can't seem to wait until Jack comes of age and becomes a womanizer like his father, despite how much younger he is.

They start in on him almost immediately, touching him inappropriately, telling him to show them his penis, describe any changes to it. The fact that Jack was able to get an erection around age eight was puzzling to me, but (I'm quite happy to say) I really don't have any experience with eight year old boys in that particular fashion, so I'm just going to have to go with it.

The fact that Jack kind of enjoys the abuse (in my mind, it's abuse) is off-putting. That all men have sex on the brain all the time and are insatiably horny I find an annoying stereotype, and Jack seems to personify this. Since his fist exposure to the older girls' games, he can't seem to stop thinking about sex.