Executive Times
		2005 Book Reviews
		Until I Find You by John Irving
		Rating: •••• (Highly Recommended)
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	Longing John Irving has mastered the long form of fiction, and his latest work, Until I Find You, captivates readers from the beginning, and retains the interest of those readers who appreciate the breadth that Irving can bring in creating unusual and interesting characters, a structured plot and the complexity of relationships. Protagonist Jack Burns searches for identity and truth. An only child, raised by his tattoo artist mother, the novel begins with Jack and his mother searching for his father, an organist, from city to city. By the time Jack is in his thirties, and is a successful actor, his longing to find truth becomes even stronger, and he continues the journey finding out that his childhood memories and his mother’s perspective didn’t reveal what was true. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 9, “Not Old Enough,” pp. 142-148: When Jack started grade one, Emma Oastler and her companions had moved on to the middle school—they were in grade seven. Less fearsome girls became the grade-six guides of the junior school; Jack wouldn’t remember them. Sometimes a whole school day, but rarely two in a row, would pass without his seeing Emma, who fiercely promised him that she would always keep in touch. And Jack’s occasional sightings of Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford were usually from a safe distance. (Fists-of Stone Holton, as he still thought of Wendy. Breasts-with-Bones- in-Them Barford, as he would forever remember Charlotte and her melon-size knees.) Miss Wong, Jack’s grade-one teacher, had been born in the Bahamas during a hurricane. Nothing noticeably like a tropical storm had remained alive in her, although her habit of apologizing for everything might have begun with the hurricane. She would never acknowledge by name the particular storm she had been born in, which might have led the grade-one children to suspect that the hurricane still flickered somewhere in her subconscious. No trace of a storm animated her listless body or gave the slightest urgency to her voice. “I am sorry to inform you, children, that the foremost difference between kindergarten and grade one is that we don’t nap,” Miss Wong announced on opening day. Naturally, her apology was greeted by collective sighs of relief, and some spontaneous expressions of gratitude—heel-thumping from the French twins, identical blanket-sucking sounds from the Booth girls, heartfelt moaning from Jimmy Bacon. That the grade-one response to her no-nap announcement did not inspire a storm of curiosity from “Miss Bahamas,” as the children called Miss Wong behind her back, was further indication of the lifelessness of their new teacher. During junior-school chapel service, which was held once a week in lieu of the daily assembly in the Great Hall, Maureen Yap whispered to Jack: “Don’t you kind of miss Emma Oastler and her sleepy-time stories?” There was an instant lump in Jack’s throat; he could neither sing nor make conversation with The Yap, as the kids called Maureen. “I know how you feel,” The Yap went on. “But what was the worst of it? What do you miss most?” “All of it,” Jack managed to reply. “We all miss it, Jack,” Caroline French said. “We all miss all of it,” her irritating twin, Gordon, corrected her. “Shove it, Gordon,” Caroline said. “I kind of miss the moaning,” Jimmy Bacon admitted. The Booth girls, though blanketless, made their identical blanket-sucking sounds. Did the grade-one children crave stories of divorced dads, passed out from too much sex? Did they long to be defenseless, yet again, in the batcave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum? Did they miss the single-mom stories, or the overlarge and oversexed boyfriends and girlfriends? Or was it Emma Oastler they missed? Emma and her friends on the Verge of puberty, or in puberty’s throes—Wendy Fists-of-Stone Holton and Charlotte Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford. There was a new girl in grade one, Lucinda Fleming. She was afflicted with what Miss Wong called “silent rage,” which took the form of the girl physically hurting herself. When Miss Wong introduced Lucinda’s affliction to the class, she spoke of her as if she weren’t there. “We must keep an eye on Lucinda,” Miss Wong told the class. Lucinda calmly received their stares. “If you see her with a sharp or dangerous-looking object, you should not hesitate to speak to me. If she looks as if she is trying to go off by herself somewhere—well, that could be dangerous for her, too. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what we should do, Lucinda?” Miss Wong asked the silent girl. “It’s okay with me,” Lucinda said, smiling serenely. She was tall and thin with pale-blue eyes and a habit of rubbing a strand of her ghostly, white-blond hair against her teeth—as if her hair were dental floss. She wore it in a massive ponytail. Caroline French inquired if this habit was harmful to Lucinda’s hair or teeth. Caroline’s point was that teeth-and-hair rubbing was probably an early indication of the silent rage, a precursor to more troubling behavior. “I’m sorry to disagree, but I don’t think so, Caroline,” Miss Wong replied. “You’re not trying to hurt yourself with your hair or your teeth, are you, Lucinda?” Miss Wong asked. “Not now,” Lucinda mumbled. She had a strand of hair in her mouth when she spoke. “It doesn’t look dangerous to me,” Maureen Yap said. (The Yap occasionally sucked her hair.) “Yeah, but it’s gross,” said Heather Booth. Patsy, Heather’s identical twin, said, “Yeah.” Jack thought it was probably a good thing that Lucinda Fleming was a new girl and had not attended kindergarten at St. Hilda’s. Who knows how Emma Oastler might have affected Lucinda’s proclivity to silent rage? Between mouthfuls of hair, Lucinda told Jack that her I mother had been impregnated by an alien; she said her father was from outer space. Although he was only six, Jack surmised that Lucinda’s mom was divorced. Emma Oastler’s saga of the squeezed child, no matter which ending, would have given Lucinda Fleming a rage to top all her rages. Jack Burns avoided what was called “the quad,” even in the spring, when the cherry trees were in bloom. The ground-floor rooms for music practice faced the courtyard; you could overhear the piano lessons from the quad. Jack occasionally imagined that his dad was still teaching someone in one of those rooms. He hated to bear that music. And the white, round chandeliers in the dining room reminded him of blank globes—of the earth strangely countryless, without discernible borders, not even indications of land and sea. Like the world where his father had gone missing; William Burns might as well have come from outer space. Jack looked carefully for evidence of Lucinda Fleming’s silent rage for the longest time, never seeing it. He wondered if he would recognize the symptoms—if he’d had a rage of his own here or there, but had somehow not known what it was. Who were the authorities on rage? (Not Miss Wong, who’d clearly managed to lose contact with the hurricane inside her.) Jack wasn’t used to seeing so little of his mother; he left for school before she got up and was asleep before she came home. As for rage, what Alice had of it might have been expressed in the pain-inflicting needles with which she marked for life so many people—mainly men. Mrs. Wicksteed, who did Jack’s necktie so patiently but absentmindedly, stuck to her be-nice-twice philosophy without ever imparting to the boy what he should do if he were pressed to be nice a third time. That he was instructed to be creative struck Jack as a nonspecific form of advice; no silent rage, or rage of any kind, was in evidence there. And Lottie, despite having lost a child, had left what amounted to her rage on Prince Edward Island—or so she implied to Jack. “I’m not an angry person anymore, Jack,” Lottie said, when he asked her what she knew about rage in general—and the silent kind, in particular. “The best thing I can tell you is not to give in to it,” Lottie said. Jack would later imagine that Lottie was one of those women, neither Young nor old, whose sexuality had been fleeting; only small traces of her remaining desire were visible, in the way you might catch her looking at herself in profile in a mirror. Glimpses of Lottie’s former attractiveness were apparent to Jack only in her most unguarded moments—when he had a nightmare and roused her from a sound sleep, or when she woke him up for school in the morning before she’d taken the time to attend to herself. Short of asking Lucinda Fleming to talk to him about her silent rage, which would have been far too simple and straightforward a solution for any six-year-old boy to conceive of, Jack worked up his courage and asked Emma Oastler instead. (If Emma wasn’t an authority on rage, who was?) But Jack was afraid of Emma; her cohorts struck him as somewhat safer places to start. That was why he worked up his courage to ask Emma by asking Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford first. He began with Wendy, only because she was the smaller of the two. The junior school got a half-hour head start for lunch. How fitting that it was under the blank globes of the dining-hall chandeliers, those unmarked worlds, where Jack spoke to Wendy. How well (and for how long!) he would remember her haunted eyes, her chewed lips, her unbrushed, dirty-blond hair—not forgetting her scraped knees, as hard as fists of stone. “What rage was that, Jack?” “Silent.” “What about it, you little creep?” “Well, what is it, exactly—what is silent rage?” he asked. “You’re not eating the mystery meat, are you?” Wendy asked, viewing his plate with disapproval. “No, I would never eat that,” Jack answered. He separated the gray meat from the beige potatoes with his fork. “You wanna see a little rage, Jack?” “Yes, I guess so,” he replied cautiously—never taking his eyes off her. Wendy had an unsettling habit of cracking her knuckles by pressing them into her underdeveloped breasts. “You wanna meet me in the washroom?” Wendy asked. “The girls’ washroom?” “I’m not getting caught with you in the boys’ washroom, you dork.” Jack wanted to think it over, but it was hard to think clearly with Wendy standing over him at his table. The word dork itself unsettled him; it seemed so out of place at a mostly all-girls’ school. “Forgive me for intruding, but aren’t you having any lunch, Wendy?” Miss Wong asked. “I’d rather die,” Wendy told her. “Well, I’m certainly sorry to hear that!” Miss Wong said. “You wanna follow me, or are you chicken?” Wendy whispered in Jack’s ear. He could feel one of her hard, bruised knees against his ribs. “Okay,” he answered. Officially, Jack needed Miss Wong’s permission to leave the dining hail, but Miss Wong was typically in an overapologetic mood (having blamed herself for attempting to force lunch on Wendy Holton, when Wendy would rather die). “Miss Wong—” he started to say. “Yes, of course, Jack,” she blurted out. “I’m so sorry if I’ve made you feel self-conscious, or that I may have delayed your leaving the table for whatever obvious good reason you have for leaving. Heavens! Don’t let me hold you up another second!” “I’ll be right back,” was all he managed to say. “I’m sure you will be, Jack,” Miss Wong said. Perhaps the faint hurricane inside her had been overcome by her contrition. In the girls’ washroom nearest the dining hall, Wendy Holton took Jack into a stall and stood him on the toilet seat. She just grabbed him in the armpits and lifted him up. Standing on the toilet seat, he was eye-to-eye with her; so he wouldn’t slip, Wendy held him by the hips. “You want to feel rage, inner rage, Jack?” “I said silent, silent rage.” “Same difference, penis breath,” Wendy said. Now there was a concept that would stay with Jack Burns for many years—penis breath! What a deeply disturbing concept it was. “Feel this,” Wendy said. She took his hands and placed them on her breasts—on her no breasts, to be more precise. “Feel what?” he asked. “Don’t be a dork, Jack—you know what they are.” “This is rage?” the boy asked. By no stretch of his imagination could he have called what his small hands held breasts. “I’m the only girl in grade seven who doesn’t have them!” Wendy exclaimed, in a smoldering fury. Well, this was rage without a doubt. “Oh.” “That’s all you can say?” she asked. “I’m sorry,” Jack quickly said. (How to apologize was all he had learned from Miss Wong.) “Jack, you’re just not old enough,” Wendy declared. She left him standing precariously on the toilet seat. “When I knock on the door from the hall three times, you’ll know it’s safe to come out,” she told him. “Rage,” Wendy said, almost as an afterthought. “Silent rage,” Jack repeated, for clarity’s sake. He saw that he should approach Charlotte Barford a little differently on this subject. But how? When Wendy knocked on the washroom door three times, Jack exited into the hail. Miss Caroline Wurtz looked surprised to see him; there was no one else in the corridor. “Jack Burns,” Miss Wurtz said Perfectly, as always. “It disappoints me to see you using the girls’ washroom.” Jack was disappointed, too, and said so, which seemed to instill in Miss Wurtz the spirit of forgiveness; she liked it when you said you understood how she felt, but her recovery from being disappointed was not always so swift. Jack had higher expectations for what he might learn from Charlotte Barford. Charlotte at least had breasts, he’d observed. Whatever the source of her rage, it was not an underdeveloped bosom. Unfortunately, he hadn’t fully prepared how he wanted to approach Charlotte Barford before Charlotte approached him. The characters and situations in Until I Find You are unusual, but the emotions and the complexity of relationships are universal. Irving’s dialogue always moves the plot forward, and provides clarity for multiple voices. At about 850 pages, this is a typical Irving novel. The demands he places on a reader are always rewarded to those who let him lead them into a world that is both strange and familiar. Steve Hopkins, August 25, 2005
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