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.
So begins John Irving's eleventh novel, Until I Find You, the story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a tattoo artist. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to North Sea ports trying to find Jack's missing father, William, a church organist who left Alice pregnant and who has a history of being addicted to affairs with women, and to being tattooed. But Alice is a mystery, and William can't be found. Even Jack's memories are subject to doubt.
Mr. Irving renders Jack's life as an actor in Hollywood with the same richness of deatil and range of emotions he uses to describe the tattoo parlors in those North Sea ports and the reverberating music Jack heard as a child in European churches.
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.
Until I Find You is a robust and comic novel, which is also extremely moving, and is one of John Irving's most important novels to date.