Is this Irving’s worst novel? No doubt about it. Will it sell gazillions of copies nevertheless? Absolutely.
The life of an actor is compromised and traumatized by his many relationships with older women, in Irving’s sprawling—in fact, overstuffed—11th novel.
Jack Burns’s earliest years are spent in his native Canada and points east, such as Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki and Edinburgh (where his father, church organist William Burns, had seduced and abandoned Jack’s mother Alice, a tattoo artist). We learn a lot about the tattooer’s art, and the occupations, avocations and fetishes of the (mostly female) people Jack encounters over the years, accompanying Alice’s pursuit of William (who keeps moving), then as a student at St. Hilda’s School for Girls, where he bonds uneasily with Emma Oastler, a preadolescent free spirit who’s the first of her gender to take a protective interest in Jack’s nubile penis. Jack moves on himself, to fledgling fame as a schoolboy actor, then to Exeter Academy and the University of New Hampshire (allowing Irving to recycle autobiographical material previously fictionalized elsewhere), a Hollywood career and an Oscar for writing a screenplay based on old pal Emma’s best-selling novel, increasing his distance from Alice (who’s found other outlets for her affections), and—after nearly 700 pages of repetitive, self-indulgent twaddle—a search for father William, who’s in a Zurich sanatorium, afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder, covered with tattoo images comprising “both a history of music and a personal history.” Until I Find You aims for plaintiveness too late, having settled, over far too many pages, for arbitrary freakishness exacerbated by what seem extraordinarily blasé dramatizations of the sexual abuse of children, for seriocomic purposes. Yes, we understand it’s supposed to be eccentrically amusing. It isn’t. And there are so many—uh, limp penis jokes that the reader begins to feel as if he’s watching a particularly inane episode of Saturday Night Live.
Is this Irving’s worst novel? No doubt about it. Will it sell gazillions of copies nevertheless? Absolutely.Pub Date: July 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6383-3
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
In her depictions of her characters and their worlds—both internal and external—Tokarczuk has created something entirely new.
A series of deaths mystifies a small Polish village.
When her neighbor Big Foot turns up dead one night, Janina Duszejko and another neighbor, Oddball, rush to his house to lay out the body and properly dress him. They’re having trouble getting hold of the police, and, as Oddball points out, “He’ll be stiff as a board before they get here.” Janina and Oddball—and Big Foot, up till now—live in an out-of-the-way Polish village on the Czech border. It’s rural, and remote, and most of the other inhabitants are part-time city-dwellers who only show up in the summer, when the weather is more temperate. Janina narrates Tokarczuk’s (Flights, 2018) latest creation to appear in English. But she wouldn’t like to hear herself referred to by that name, which she thinks is “scandalously wrong and unfair.” In fact, she explains, “I try my best never to use first names and surnames, but prefer epithets that come to mind of their own accord the first time I see a Person”—hence “Oddball” and “Big Foot.” Janina spends much of her time studying astrology and, on Fridays, translating passages of Blake with former pupil Dizzy, who comes to visit. But after Big Foot dies, other bodies start turning up, and Janina and her neighbors are drawn further and further into the mystery of their deaths. Some of the newly dead were involved in illegal activities, but Janina is convinced that “Animals” (she favors a Blakean style of capitalization) are responsible. Tokarczuk’s novel is a riot of quirkiness and eccentricity, and the mood of the book, which shifts from droll humor to melancholy to gentle vulnerability, is unclassifiable—and just right. Tokarczuk’s mercurial prose seems capable of just about anything. Like the prizewinning Flights, this novel resists the easy conventions of the contemporary work of fiction.
In her depictions of her characters and their worlds—both internal and external—Tokarczuk has created something entirely new.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-54133-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.
Wayne’s latest foray into the dark minds of lonely young men follows the rise and fall of a friendship between two aspiring fiction writers on opposite sides of a vast cultural divide.
In 1996, our unnamed protagonist is living a cushy New York City life: He's a first-year student in Columbia’s MFA program in fiction (the exorbitant bill footed by his father) who’s illegally subletting his great-aunt’s rent-controlled East Village apartment (for which his father also foots the bill). And it is in this state—acutely aware of his unearned advantages, questioning his literary potential, and deeply alone—that he meets Billy. Billy is an anomaly in the program: a community college grad from small-town Illinois, staggeringly talented, and very broke. But shared unease is as strong a foundation for friendship as any, and soon, our protagonist invites Billy to take over his spare room, a mutually beneficial if precarious arrangement. They are the very clear products of two different Americas, one the paragon of working-class hardscrabble masculinity, the other an exemplar of the emasculating properties of parental wealth—mirror images, each in possession of what the other lacks. “He would always have to struggle to stay financially afloat,” our protagonist realizes, “and I would always be fine, all because my father was a professional and his was a layabout. I had an abundance of resources; here was a concrete means for me to share it.” And he means it, when he thinks it, and for a while, the affection between them is enough to (mostly) paper over the awkward imbalance of the setup. Wayne (Loner, 2016) captures the nuances of this dynamic—a musky cocktail of intimacy and rage and unspoken mutual resentment—with draftsmanlike precision, and when the breaking point comes, as, of course, it does, it leaves one feeling vaguely ill, in the best way possible.
A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-400-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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