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the complete review - fiction

Until I Find You

by
John Irving

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B- : episodically entertaining, but lumpy and long

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus

  From the Reviews:

• "All in all, this is a wonderfully thought-provoking book. Despite its length and heft (I was afraid of dropping it on my foot), its artistry is so compelling that I'm considering reading it again. How weird is that ?" - Sharon Barrett, Chicago Sun-Times
  
  
• "Above all else, though, this is a work of Serious Literature, chiseled onto the page by one of America's most important living authors. And, unfortunately, sometimes it reads like it. Irving can be a masterfully unfussy writer with a fantastic sense of humor, but in these 800 pages he's in no rush to entertain." - Benjamin Svetkey, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "(I)t's particularly disappointing that Until I Find You proves to be such a flabby belly-flop of a book." - Christian House, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "As always, his writing is enormously readable and accessible. His prose is determinedly straightforward and clear. Irving is a compulsive, wildly inventive storyteller, and the length gives him room not just for Jack's life story but for rollicking synopses of Jack's movies, the plots of Jack's best friend's bizarre-noir novels and various characters' back stories. (...) A writer's mandate, whether working to 19th or 21st century standards, is to be interesting. Anything else reads like self-indulgence -- or like a lack of perspective or editing. Until I Find You, an often stunningly visual novel, is burdened by bloat." - Heller McAlpin, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Although Until I Find You is permeated by a keen sense of melancholy, it lacks the controlled sentimentality of Irving's previous work. (...) Although this is an extremely long book, none of the characters is especially well developed, including Jack, who never shakes off an essential blankness." - Natasha Tripney, New Statesman
  
  
• "(I)ts celebrated writer still has the ability to create a colorful, all-enveloping world. But the book is emotionally barren, antsy in its execution, and too precious by half." - Joe Neumaier, NY Daily News
  
  
• "The middle section contains so much lovely writing and so many comical vignettes that it's with real regret that I say it's utterly gratuitous. It occurs to me that with some really sharp editing (are you listening, Random House ?), there may be two very satisfactory novels to be had here instead of one borderline awful one." - Nan Goldberg, The New York Observer
  
  
• "(B)loated and lugubrious (.....) Jack Burns emerges from this book as a passive, curiously vacant fellow about whom it's difficult to care. As for the supporting cast of Until I Find You, it's made up of generic crazies, predators and victims - comic-strip figures, drawn with the author's customary taste for exaggeration and melodrama, but without his usual energy and humor. (...) (I)t also feels as though it had been written on automatic pilot. (...) (A) tedious, self-indulgent and cruelly eye-glazing read." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
  
  
• "It should be interesting to see how real life kicks the slats out from under this narcissistic lad's illusions.And it surely would have been, except that real life misses its appointment with Irving's novel. (...) Until I Find You is an immensely protracted story devoid of any conflict." - Paul Gray, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "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." - The New Yorker
  
  
• "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." - Elena Seymenliyska, The Observer
  
  
• "Irving's performance is uncertain throughout." - Adam Mars-Jones, The Observer
  
  
• "At more than 800 pages, Until I Find You takes the crown for the best longest novel of recent years. (...) (I)f the story of Jack Burns, Hollywood star and screenwriter, and his quest to find his father had been a third or even twice again as long, I would have stayed with it." - Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "That a novel about repetition should repeat itself might, in certain circumstances, be excused as a novelist’s conceit. When those repetitions are sustained over 824 pages, however, one is forced to conclude that the cause is bad writing of a previously unseen order of magnitude. (...) To write 824 pages this monotonous -- to have chosen always the mediocre word, the unevocative phrase -- must be considered an accomplishment of sorts." - Robert Macfarlane, Sunday Times
  
  
• "At 820 pages, the novel is absurdly long. It seems wimpish to complain when six-year-olds can read that much Harry Potter before breakfast; but the writing here is pretty sedate, with little of the sparkle Irving produced in his last book, The Fourth Hand. But its gentle, perplexed hero, with his lost-boy innocence, lodges in the memory." - David Robson, The Telegraph
  
  
• "Even so, the book is a page-turner, though that could be another way of saying it rarely arrests your attention - except when it irritates. There's a vein of self-congratulation running through it." - Benjamin Markovits, The Telegraph
  
  
• "It’s too damn long and never seems to know when to rein itself in. Naturally, you have to admire Irving’s descriptive talents -- his deft detailing of a plethora of landscapes and cultures. Similarly, its ambitious scope and its manifold questions about the nature of individual identity, all merit praise. But such virtues are undermined by narrative fat. (...) As such, it’s a messy sprawl. But I did keep turning the page" - Douglas Kennedy, The Times
  
  
• "In its details, the novel can be irritating. The flabby prose might be an attempt to underline the meandering quality of a memoir (...) but reads more like lack of editing. (...) But in its broader vision, Until I Find You is a powerful, occasionally beautiful work and none of its difficulties is incidental." - Chris Moss, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "There are some brilliant and hilarious passages, but a big problem too: It's hard to get emotionally invested in movie star Jack Burns who, for much of the novel, is acting more than living. (...) It's both sad and comic, full of melancholy and promiscuous sex." - Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
  
  
• "(H)is most erotically fraught work yet. (...) Until I Find You may stymie the reader with its own tactics of emotional distancing. For a story about psychological reckoning -- Jack undergoes five years of intensive therapy to sort the damage done -- it feels oddly reticent." - Benjamin Strong, The Village Voice
  
  
• "Irving's latest tale purports to be about Jack Burns (...) but really it's about Jack's penis, which, as a leading character in a novel of this length, has a paralyzingly narrow narrative scope, limited dialogue and no linguistically interesting stream-of-consciousness whatsoever. (...) The story reads as if Irving woke from a recurring nightmare and started dictating compulsively. He's too good a journeyman to have written anything this bad on purpose, and I kept asking myself, "What's he up to ? How's he going to salvage this ?" " - Marianne Wiggins, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Denn vor allem diesen Eindruck wird man bei der Lektüre nicht los: Bis ich dich finde wurde mit angehaltenem Atem und zusammengebissenen Zähnen verfaßt." - Wieland Freund, Die Welt

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Until I Find You is the story of Jack Burns. His father is William Burns, an irresistible (to women), organ-playing man who was never a part of Jack's life, and the first section of the novel recounts then four year-old Jack being dragged around much of northern Europe by his tattoo-artist mother, Alice, apparently on the hunt for William (who remains always a step -- or a port -- ahead of them). The title suggests -- and this first part reinforces the notion -- that Until I Find You is a quest-tale, and certainly Jack (and even more so, Alice) seem to need to find William in order to become whole.
       The trail ends when the next port of call is Australia, which is too far for Alice and William to go. So she turns tail, and returns to Canada -- and that's pretty much all there is as far as the father-hunt goes until very, very much later in the book. It's not that his shadow doesn't hang over Jack, however. Lots of people -- especially women (and girls) -- remember William, and expect the boy to follow in his father's footsteps. As one girl explains to the young schoolboy

     "You're going to be like your dad -- we're all counting on it."

     "But the purpose for doing this, Jack, is that when you tell me your life story, you reveal yourself -- at least that's what usually happens, that's what's supposed to happen," Dr. García said. "I regret that, in your case, you've been a very faithful storyteller -- and a very thorough one, I believe -- yet I don't feel that I know you. I know what's happened to you. Do I ever know it -- ad nauseam ! But you haven't revealed yourself, Jack. I still don't know who you are.

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Links:

• Ballantine publicity page
• Black Swan publicity page
• Diogenes publicity page
• Profile in The Guardian

• About.com
• Boston Globe
• culturevulture.net
• Deutschlandradio (German)
• Entertainment Weekly
• A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore...
• January Magazine
• Keep the Wisdom
• Kirkus Reviews
• New Statesman
• The New York Times
• The New York Times Book Review
• The New Yorker
• Nom de plume
• The Observer
• The Observer
• Publishers Weekly
• ReadySteadyBook
• San Francisco Chronicle
• The Seattle Times
• Slate
• The Stranger
• Der Tagesspiegel (German)
• taz (German)
• Le Temps (French)
• USA Today
• The Village Voice
• The Washington Post
• Well above average

• Official site
• John Irving at The Guardian

• In One Person
• The Last Chairlift
• [Last Night in Twisted River]
• My Movie Business
• A Prayer for Owen Meany
• A Son of the Circus
• Trying to save Piggy Sneed

• See Index of Contemporary American fiction under review

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About the Author:

       John Winslow Irving, American author, born 1942. Born in Exeter, New Hampshire he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy. Author of numerous very successful novels, he first achieved widespread recognition with The World according to Garp.

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