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Until I Find You
A Novel
Written by John Irving
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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 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.
Excerpt
Chapter 1In the Care of Churchgoers and Old Girls
According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor, but Jack’s most vivid memories of childhood were those moments when he felt compelled to hold his mother’s hand. He wasn’t acting then.
Of course we don’t remember much until we’re four or five years old — and what we remember at that early age is very selective or incomplete, or even false. What Jack recalled as the first time he felt the need to reach for his mom’s hand was probably the hundredth or two hundredth time.
Preschool tests revealed that Jack Burns had a vocabulary beyond his years, which is not uncommon among only children accustomed to adult conversation — especially only children of single parents. But of greater significance, according to the tests, was Jack’s capacity for consecutive memory, which, when he was three, was comparable to that of a nine-year-old. At four, his retention of detail and understanding of linear time were equal to an eleven-year-old’s. (The details included, but were not limited to, such trivia as articles of clothing and the names of streets.)
These test results were bewildering to Jack’s mother, Alice, who considered him to be an inattentive child; in her view, Jack’s propensity for daydreaming made him immature for his age.
Nevertheless, in the fall of 1969, when Jack was four and had not yet started kindergarten, his mother walked with him to the corner of Pickthall and Hutchings Hill Road in Forest Hill, which was a nice neighborhood in Toronto. They were waiting for school to be let out, Alice explained, so that Jack could see the girls.
St. Hilda’s was then called “a church school for girls,” from kindergarten through grade thirteen — at that time still in existence, in Canada — and Jack’s mother had decided that this was where Jack would begin his schooling, although he was a boy. She waited to tell him of her decision until the main doors of the school opened, as if to greet them, and the girls streamed through in varying degrees of sullenness and exultation and prettiness and slouching disarray.
“Next year,” Alice announced, “St. Hilda’s is going to admit boys. Only a very few boys, and only up to grade four.”
Jack couldn’t move; he could barely breathe. Girls were passing him on all sides, some of them big and noisy, all of them in uniforms in those colors Jack Burns later came to believe he would wear to his grave — gray and maroon. The girls wore gray sweaters or maroon blazers over their white middy blouses.
“They’re going to admit you,” Jack’s mother told him. “I’m arranging it.”
“How?” he asked.
“I’m still figuring that out,” Alice replied.
The girls wore gray pleated skirts with gray kneesocks, which Canadians called “knee-highs.” It was Jack’s first look at all those bare legs. He didn’t yet understand how the girls were driven by some interior unrest to push their socks down to their ankles, or at least below their calves — despite the school rule that knee-highs should be worn knee-high.
Jack Burns further observed that the girls didn’t see him standing there, or they looked right through him. But there was one — an older girl with womanly hips and breasts, and lips as full as Alice’s. She locked onto Jack’s eyes, as if she were powerless to avert her gaze.
At the age of four, Jack wasn’t sure if he was the one who couldn’t look away from her, or if she was the one who was trapped and couldn’t look away from him. Whichever the case, her expression was so knowing that she frightened him. Perhaps she had seen what Jack would look like as an older boy, or a grown man, and what she saw in him riveted her with longing and desperation. (Or with fear and degradation, Jack Burns would one day conclude, because this same older girl suddenly looked away.)
Jack and his mom went on standing in the sea of girls, until the girls’ rides had come and gone, and those on foot had left not even the sound of their shoes behind, or their intimidating but stimulating laughter. However, there was still enough warmth in the early-fall air to hold their scent, which Jack reluctantly inhaled and confused with perfume. With most of the girls at St. Hilda’s, it was not their perfume that lingered in the air; it was the smell of the girls themselves, which Jack Burns would never grow used to or take for granted. Not even by the time he left grade four.
“But why am I going to school here?” Jack asked his mother, when the girls had gone. Some fallen leaves were all that remained in motion on the quiet street corner.
“Because it’s a good school,” Alice answered. “And you’ll be safe with the girls,” she added.
Jack must not have thought so, because he instantly reached for his mom’s hand.
In that fall of the year before Jack’s admission to St. Hilda’s, his mother was full of surprises. After showing him the uniformed girls, who would soon dominate his life, Alice announced that she would work her way through northern Europe in search of Jack’s runaway dad. She knew the North Sea cities where he was most likely to be hiding from them; together they would hunt him down and confront him with his abandoned responsibilities. Jack Burns had often heard his mother refer to the two of them as his father’s “abandoned responsibilities.” But even at the age of four, Jack had come to the conclusion that his dad had left them for good — in Jack’s case, before he was born.
And when his mom said she would work her way through these foreign cities, Jack knew what her work was. Like her dad, Alice was a tattoo artist; tattooing was the only work she knew.
In the North Sea cities on their itinerary, other tattooists would give Alice work. They knew she’d been apprenticed to her father, a well-known tattooer in Edinburgh — officially, in the Port of Leith — where Jack’s mom had suffered the misfortune of meeting his dad. It was there he got her pregnant, and subsequently left her.
In Alice’s account, Jack’s father sailed on the New Scotland, which docked in Halifax. When he was gainfully employed, he would send for her — or so he had promised. But Alice said she never heard from him — only of him. Before moving on from Halifax, Jack’s dad had cut quite a swath.
Born Callum Burns, Jack’s father changed his first name to William when he was still in university. His father was named Alasdair, which William said was Scots enough for the whole family. In Edinburgh, at the time of his scandalous departure for Nova Scotia, William Burns had been an associate of the Royal College of Organists, which meant that he had a diploma in organ-playing in addition to his bachelor’s in music. When he met Jack’s mother, William was the organist at South Leith Parish Church; Alice was a choirgirl there.
For an Edinburgh boy with upper-class pretensions and a good education — William Burns had gone to Heriot’s before studying music at the University of Edinburgh — a first job playing the organ in lower-class Leith might have struck him as slumming. But Jack’s dad liked to joke that the Church of Scotland paid better than the Scottish Episcopal Church. While William was an Episcopalian, he liked it just fine at the South Leith Parish, where it was said that eleven thousand souls were buried in the graveyard, although there were not more than three hundred gravestones.
Gravestones for the poor were not permitted. But at night, Jack’s mom told him, people brought the ashes of loved ones and scattered them through the fence of the graveyard. The thought of so many souls blowing around in the dark gave the boy nightmares, but that church — if only because of its graveyard — was a popular place, and Alice believed she had died and gone to Heaven when she started singing for William there.
In South Leith Parish Church, the choir and the organ were behind the congregation. There were not more than twenty seats for the choir — the women in front, the men in back. For the duration of the sermon, William made a point of asking Alice to lean forward in the front row, so that he could see all of her. She wore a blue robe — “blue-jay blue,” she told Jack — and a white collar. Jack’s mom fell in love with his dad that April of 1964, when he first came to play the organ.
“We were singing the hymns of the Resurrection,” was how Alice put it, “and there were crocuses and daffodils in the graveyard.” (Doubtless all those ashes that were secretly scattered there benefited the flowers.)
Alice took the young organist, who was also her choirmaster, to meet her father. Her dad’s tattoo parlor was called Persevere, which is the motto of the Port of Leith. It was William’s first look at a tattoo shop, which was on either Mandelson Street or Jane Street. In those days, Jack’s mom explained, there was a rail bridge across Leith Walk, joining Mandelson to Jane, but Jack could never remember on which street she said the tattoo parlor was. He just knew that they lived there, in the shop, under the rumble of the trains.
His mother called this “sleeping in the needles” — a phrase from between the wars. “Sleeping in the needles” meant that, when times were tough, you slept in the tattoo parlor — you had nowhere else to live. But it was also what was said, on occasion, when a tattoo artist died — as Alice’s father had — in the shop. Thus, by both definitions of the phrase, her dad had always slept in the needles.
Alice’s mother had died in childbirth, and her father — whom Jack never met — had raised her in the tattoo world. In Jack’s eyes, his mom was unique among tattoo artists because she’d never been tattooed. Her dad had told her that she shouldn’t get a tattoo until she was old enough to understand a few essential things about herself; he must have meant those things that would never change.
“Like when I’m in my sixties or seventies,” Jack’s mom used to say to him, when she was still in her twenties. “You should get your first tattoo after I’m dead,” she told him, which was her way of saying that he shouldn’t even think about getting tattooed.
Alice’s dad took an instant dislike to William Burns, who got his first tattoo the day the two men met. The tattoo gripped his right thigh, where William could read it when he was sitting on the toilet — the opening notes to an Easter hymn he’d been rehearsing with Alice, the words to which began, “Christ the Lord is risen today.” Without the words, you’d have to read music, and be sitting very close to Jack’s father — perhaps on an adjacent toilet — to recognize the hymn.
But then and there, upon giving the talented young organist his first tattoo, Alice’s dad told her that William would surely become an “ink addict,” a “collector” — meaning he was one of those guys who would never stop with the first tattoo, or with the first twenty tattoos. He would go on getting tattooed, until his body was a sheet of music and every inch of his skin was covered by a note — a dire prediction but one that failed to warn Alice away. The tattoo-crazy organist had already stolen her heart.
But Jack Burns had heard most of this story by the time he was four. What came as a surprise, when his mother announced their upcoming European trip, was what she told him next: “If we don’t find your father by this time next year, when you’ll be starting school, we’ll forget all about him and get on with our lives.”
Why this was such a shock was that, from Jack’s earliest awareness that his father was missing — worse, that he had “absconded” — Jack and his mother had done a fair amount of looking for William Burns, and Jack had assumed they always would. The idea that they could “forget all about him” was more foreign to the boy than the proposed journey to northern Europe; nor had Jack known that, in his mom’s opinion, his starting school was of such importance.
She’d not finished school herself. Alice had long felt inferior to William’s university education. William’s parents were both elementary-school teachers who gave private piano lessons to children on the side, but they had a high regard for artistic tutelage of a more professional kind. In their estimation, it was beneath their son to play the organ at South Leith Parish Church — and not only because of the class friction that existed in those days between Edinburgh and Leith. (There were differences between the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Church of Scotland, too.)
Alice’s father was not a churchgoer of any kind. He’d sent Alice to church and choir practice to give her a life outside the tattoo parlor, never imagining that she would meet her ruin in the church and at choir practice — or that she would bring her unscrupulous seducer to the shop to be tattooed!
It was William’s parents who insisted that, although he was the principal organist for the South Leith Parish, he accept an offer to be the assistant organist at Old St. Paul’s. What mattered to them was that Old St. Paul’s was Scottish Episcopal — and it was in Edinburgh, not in Leith.
What captivated William was the organ. He’d started piano lessons at six and had not touched an organ before he was nine, but at seven or eight he began to stick bits of paper above the piano keys — imagining they were organ stops. He’d already begun to dream about playing the organ, and the organ he dreamed about was the Father Willis at Old St. Paul’s.
If, in his parents’ opinion, to be the assistant organist at Old St. Paul’s was more prestigious than being the principal organist at South Leith Parish Church, William just wanted to get his hands on the Father Willis. In Old St. Paul’s, Jack’s mother told him, the acoustics were a contributing factor to the organ’s fame. The boy would later wonder if she meant that almost any organ would have sounded good there, because of the reverberation time — that is, the time it takes for a sound to diminish by sixty decibels — being better than the organ.
Alice remembered attending what she called “an organ marathon” at Old St. Paul’s. Such an event must have been for fund-raising purposes — a twenty-four-hour organ concert, with a different organist performing every hour or half hour. Who played when was, of course, a hierarchical arrangement; the best musicians performed when they were most likely to be heard, the others at the more unsociable hours. Young William Burns got to play before midnight — if only a half hour before.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpted from Until I Find You by John Irving. Copyright © 2005 by John Irving. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
About John Irving
Photo © Jane Sobel
The World According to Garp, which won the National Book Award in 1980, was John Irving's fourth novel and his first international bestseller. Irving's novels are now translated into thirty-five languages, and he has had nine international bestsellers. In One Person is John Irving's thirteenth novel.
Author Q&A
A Conversation with the Author
Q: Daughter Alice’s strange and wonderful world of tattooing comes to life in Until I Find You, from the “flash” tacked to the parlor walls to the bands of fiercely loyal tattooists. What gave you the initial idea to set the novel in this world?
John Irving: I build a novel from the back to the front; I know the end of the story before I write the first sentence. I try to write the last sentence first, even the last several paragraphs. I knew that Jack’s father, William Burns, was waiting for his son to find him; I knew that William was institutionalized in a Swiss sanatorium, and that the final two chapters of the novel would bring us there. I began with the life of this man who has suffered losses–his son, two women he loved, lastly his music. I began with what physical manifestation his obsessive-compulsive disorder might take. That led me to making him a full-body–a tattoo addict. And that in turn led me to make Alice a tattoo artist, and the daughter of the tattoo artist who gives William his first tattoo.
Q: How did you research tattoo culture? Did you visit many parlors?
JI: In A Widow for One Year, when I was doing research in Amsterdam with a policeman–about the details concerning the murder of a prostitute–the policeman introduced me to Amsterdam’s most famous tattoo artist, Henk Schiffmacher. His tattoo name is Hanky Panky, but the police in Amsterdam used him as a handwriting analyst; he was also good at deciphering partial fingerprints. I already knew him. He was the first person I turned to for my tattoo research.
Meeting Henk led me to making connections with other tattoo artists in those North Sea ports. He knew everyone. I visited more than a dozen tattoo parlors in Europe; several in the U.S. and Canada, too, and I went to many tattoo conventions. I got two tattoos, so I knew what it felt like to be tattooed, and I learned how to tattoo. I gave a woman in Amsterdam a tattoo on her forearm. It was a sprig of holly to cover up a former boyfriend’s name. She must not have liked my work, because when I met her for dinner a few years later, she had covered up my cover-up with a third tattoo.
Q: You say in the novel that tattooing is a “sentimental” pursuit; how so?
JI: Maritime tattooing, from the end of World War I through the late 1960s or early 1970s, was chiefly souvenir shopping; one marked the body the way people used to put travel stickers on their suitcases. Ports of call, hearts (broken and otherwise), sailing ships, girls in grass skirts, mermaids, sea monsters, pirates. And there were always religious tattoos–20 percent of all tattoos are religious. But all that has changed. The maritime world is fading. The new tattoos are too various to name.
Q: Have you met any “collectors,” like Jack’s dad, William Burns? What do you think drives this particular obsession?
JI: I have met a few collectors. They often don’t know why they can’t stop; the reasons vary. People are obsessed by different demons; it’s impossible to generalize the motives of tattoo addicts, just as there is no single reason, medically, why many full-body types feel cold. But many of them do. Jack comes to the conclusion that his father has had the sort of life that might make anyone feel cold; maybe the tattoos have nothing to do with it.
Q: Another fascinating world that is re-created in the novel is that of Hollywood, as Jack embarks upon his film career. How did your experiences writing screenplays and working with film agents influence your portrayal of Hollywood?
JI: My experiences in Hollywood–the people, producers, actors, and directors I have known–certainly helped me shape a life for Jack in L.A. My eldest son and his family live there. The film producer Richard Gladstein, who made The Cider House Rules, has become a close friend–as have my agent at C.A.A., Bob Bookman, and my entertainment lawyer, Alan Hergott. They’re all in the novel. I love Los Angeles. I might not love it if I lived there, or if the movie business were my only business. I like writing screenplays and working in that world as an occasional change from the solitary endeavor of writing a novel, but writing novels is my first love. I couldn’t live without writing novels; writing a movie is just for fun.
Q: What do you think Jack Burns would have become, had he not chosen acting?
JI: Maybe Jack would have been a writer if he hadn’t been an actor first. They are similar. Jack is most uncomfortable being himself. Being someone else is easier. I invent whole lives for a living; I am someone else, or several other people, every day.
Q: Along those lines, is there another career, other than writing, that you yourself could have imagined undertaking?
JI: I might have been an actor; I was always comfortable onstage, and my writing is always very visual–cinematic, really. Read the opening “shot” (as I call it) to Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It’s a movie. Were they alive today, both Hardy and Dickens would have written screenplays. (I hope they would have written novels, too, of course.)
Q: Can you imagine a film being made of Until I Find You?
JI: I can easily imagine a film of Until I Find You. It would begin at the end of the novel, or near the end–in Part V, anyway. It would begin with Jack talking to Dr. Garcia, deep in “therapy”; Jack’s voice-over would narrate the story of his life in chronological order, with occasional interruptions from Dr. Garcia. Since I wrote many drafts of this novel in the first-person voice, I have in essence already written the voice-over. The film ends when he calls Dr. Garcia from the hotel room in Zurich and leaves a message for her on her answering machine. “Thank you for listening to meÉ” etc.
Q: The sport of wrestling makes another appearance in your work, as Jack Burns proves to be an accomplished wrestler in high school. Do you know the sport well?
JI: I’ve wrestled for twenty years.
Q: One particularly moving passage in the novel, that is also printed on the back cover, reads: “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.” Do you think it’s possible to have a pure childhood in today’s world? Do you think children grow up too fast, even under the healthiest circumstances? Or is this loss, this growing up, just a natural and inevitable part of childhood?
JI: No adult in my family would tell me anything about who my father was–not until I was thirty-nine and divorcing my first wife. This was an immeasurable gift to my imagination; I have been inventing my father most of my writing life. And I had sex with an older woman when I was eleven; in Until I Find You, Jack is ten. This is not without effect. As a teenager, and into my twenties and thirties I had an attraction to older women that I couldn’t understand or explain. I am an overprotective father–even a paranoid one. But human experience is individual. I am a novelist and occasional screenwriter because I don’t believe in generalizations; I believe in specific stories.
Q: We’re always curious to know how a writer writes; would you mind sharing a glimpse of your process and craft?
JI: I believe in plot. I must know where I’m going before I start. When I start writing a book, the actual writing, I don’t want to be distracted from the sentences themselves. I want to know the story ahead of me; I know all about the characters. I want to be thinking only about the sentences–writing them and rewriting them. Revision is more than half of my work as a writer.
Q: After spending so much time with Jack Burns, inside his head, has he become one of your favorite characters? Do you even have favorite characters–or, like children, do you simply love them all? Or, this might be fun: Do you have a favorite minor character in the novel? One that others might overlook?
JI: Like children, I love all my characters, but some were a bigger stretch for me than others. Dr. Larch in The Cider House Rules, Dr. Daruwalla in A Son of the Circus. I take pride in them. Jack Burns was the hardest of them all because he’s not a stretch; he was hard because he was the most like me. Certain minor characters repeat themselves. Melony in Cider House is reborn as Hester in A Prayer for Owen Meany, and they are both reborn and enlarged upon in the character of Emma in Until I Find You. Emma is an achievement I’m proud of. I love her. In another way, for her power over Jack, I love Emma’s mother, Mrs. Oastler, too.
Q: Along those lines, is there a minor moment or scene in the novel that resonates with you in a special way? Something others might overlook, but that you might have a peculiar fancy for, or something that makes you laugh?
JI: In Until I Find You, Jack entertains the illusion that he actually “remembers” his trip to the North Sea with his mom when he was four–he is confronted by the truth of how little he could possibly have “remembered” only in Helsinki when he meets the four-year-old son of the pregnant aerobics instructor. He sees himself in that boy. That’s a huge moment in the book for me.
Q: Are there particular books or authors that have influenced you? What is your own favorite book?
JI: Dickens was and remains the most important author for me. I have read his books many times, and have even purposely not read one of them. I am saving it for a severe illness or a near-death experience. Something I will read when I have to despair of doing anything else. I have not read Our Mutual Friend. That’s the one I have saved.
From the Hardcover edition.
Praise
“As ever, Irving is at his best with the family relationships he creates. They are simultaneously touching and infuriating. It is with these relationships that Irving firmly grasps universal truths and puts a chokehold on his readers…. Irving’s descriptions are distressing to read, but they force the reader to relate to the characters in a way they would not in most works of fiction.”–Calgary Herald
“Bittersweet . . . moving.”
–People
“Until I Find You . . . cuts closer to the bone than any of [Irving’s] previous works.”
–Ottawa Citizen
Praise for John Irving:
John Irving has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation; he has won an O. Henry Award, a National Book Award and an Oscar.
“Irving’s novels are perceptive and precise reflections of the world around us.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“John Irving is one of the very finest writers alive today.”
—The Associated Press
“A serious artist of remarkable powers.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Irving’s popularity is not hard to understand. His world is really the world according to nearly everyone.”
—Time
“A premier storyteller, master of the tragicomic and among the first rank of contemporary novelists.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“[Irving’s] instincts are so basically sound, his talent for storytelling so bright and strong that he gets down to the truth of his time.
—The New York Times Book Review
“John Irving is a writer of prodigious talent.”
—Calgary Herald
“John Irving is devoted to his people and his plots in a way that makes him unique among the most popular and widely read of the living American novelists. He has become his generation’s Dickens.”
—NOW Magazine
“He is among the very best storytellers at work today. At the base of Irving’s own moral concerns is a rare and lasting regard for human kindness.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
Praise for The Fourth Hand:
“A rich and deeply moving tale. . .Vintage Irving: A story of two very disparate people, and the strange ways we grow. . . . Irving’s novels are perceptive and precise reflections of the world around us.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Using comedy, satiric social commentary and his adroit ability to tell a good yarn, Irving proffers a sweet love story with the very serious underlying theme of human transformation.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“John Irving is one of the very finest writers alive today.”
—The Associated Press
From the Hardcover edition.
Discussion Guides
1. Jack Burns’s most vivid childhood memory is the moment of reaching for his mother’s hand. Why is this feeling so significant for Jack? Is there a similarly powerful memory from your own childhood that you can recall? Why has it stayed with you?
2. “The trip to the North Sea with his mother had formed Jack Burns” (309). In what ways had the search for his father–which took Jack and Alice from Copenhagen’s tattoo parlors to Amsterdam’s red light district–shaped Jack’s character? Also, discuss how Jack’s perception of the odyssey changes over the course of the novel. If this trip “formed” him, how does the “revision” of the trip later in the novel “un-form” him?
3. Describe Jack’s mother, Alice Stronach, and discuss her heartache and human failings. Did you feel sympathy for her? Anger? Both? In her own way, was Alice ever a good mother to Jack? Do you think she would have been a different mother, or woman, had William Burns chosen to stay with her?
4. As a reader, you also may have felt subject to Alice’s deceptions; are you willing to forgive her? Is Jack?
5. John Irving captures the peculiar, gritty, and fascinating world of tattooing with its eccentric heroes, history, and unique fraternity. What about this subculture surprised you most? Why do you think some people are addicted to being tattooed?
6. Describe the image and significance of the broken heart tattoo on the cover of the novel. Do you think tattoos are for the fierce at heart, or for the sentimental? If you were ever to get a tattoo, what would you choose?
7. In both positive and negative ways, women and girls have a profound impact on Jack Burns. How is the “sea of girls” at St. Hilda’s transformative for him? Describe Emma Oastler, and her peculiar relationship with Jack. Consider also Miss Wurtz, and Mrs. McQuat–the “Gray Ghost” who was “always the voice of Jack’s conscience” (330).
8. As John Irving writes, “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.” How is Jack slowly robbed of his childhood? Discuss Alice, Mrs. Oastler, and Mrs. Machado as “thieves” of Jack’s childhood. Do you think it is possible to have an innocent childhood today? How long does childhood last?
9. Why does Jack Burns love performing? After working with Miss Wurtz, why does he come to the conclusion that “Life was not a stage; life was improv” (163)?
10. Who is Jack’s “audience of one,” and how does the vision of this sole spectator affect his acting and, more generally, his life? In your own life, who would you choose to envision as your “audience of one”?
11. Discuss the theme of sexuality in the novel, both in its positive and negative forms. How does Jack’s abuse haunt his later relationships with Michele and Claudia? Also, why does Jack feel most comfortable portraying women in film? Is Jack’s transvestism a way for him to control, or perhaps hide, his sexuality?
12. Consider Jack’s reaction to Emma’s death. Why can’t he cry? Describe Emma’s hold on Jack, both in life–at St. Hilda’s, the Oastler household and the house on Entrada Drive– and in death, with her odd “gift” of the Slush-Pile Reader screenplay. Did Emma ultimately help Jack or hurt him? Do you think her motivations were selfless, or selfish? Finally, why does her death leave Jack feeling as though he “[doesn’t] know who he [is]” (431)?
13. As Irving writes, “So much of what you think you remember is a lie” (532). After Alice’s death, when Jack embarks on his second trip to the North Sea ports, we learn along with him that much of what he remembers about his past is untrue. How did you feel, as a reader, to learn that Jack had been lied to, and that his memories (and our memory, as readers) were false? Discuss your reaction to the “revision” of Jack’s life, to the elusive nature of memory, and consider how perspective can change the entire truth of a story.
14. Describe Jack’s reunion with his father. Were you surprised by William’s condition? Even though William was absent for many years, how did he manage to be very much involved in his son’s life?
15. When does Jack finally stop “acting”? Describe the moment with Heather when he becomes “the real Jack Burns at last” (747). What brings him into himself for the first time? Have you ever had a moment like this, when your life suddenly clicked? When your sense of self became noticeably whole or true, even for an instance?
- Until I Find You by John Irving
- May 30, 2006
- Fiction - Literary; Fiction
- Ballantine Books
- $15.95
- 9780345479723
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