Jack and John

John Irving‘s newest novel — his 11th, Until I Find You — opens with four-year-old Jack Burns being dragged through northern Europe by his tattoo-artist mother, looking for his vanished organ-player father. They don’t find him and so return to Canada, at which time Jack’s becomes a life of sexual dysfunction. A series of older women molest him. His mother becomes a lesbian. He experiments with cross-dressing. He grows up and becomes a famous actor, but he’s never able to maintain a healthy relationship. Finally, a series of calamities sends him looking for his long-lost father, whom he’s always blamed for his problems.

Missing fathers and sexually precocious youngsters have long been prominent Irving themes, but it wasn’t known until recently that these are also major themes in the author’s own life. Irving only just revealed that an older woman had sex with him when he was 11. Also, he confessed that he’s spent his life obsessed with his biological father, who left him and his mother when he was a toddler. Irving did not look for him: “Iwas afraid, I suppose, if I contacted him, it wouldn’t have been nice to learn that he was indifferent,” he says. “It was easier to imagine that he was reading every word I wrote.”

Irving, who is well known for writing the ends of his books first, created the characters of the missing father, and the half-sister who ultimately leads Jack to him, before the occurrence of a real-life twist the author calls “unnerving.” His own half-brother (whom Irving didn’t know existed) contacted him. Irving was saddened to learn that his father had died, in 1996. But he was pleased to hear he’d been a good father to his four other children.

“It was difficult for me to write about a character I felt as uncomfortably close to as Jack Burns,” Irving says. He became depressed during the book’s composition. It took seven years to complete, during which time he traveled to Europe three times, won an Oscar (for adapting The Cider House Rules) and even wrote another novel, The Fourth Hand. He procrastinated further by researching maritime tattooing and church-organ playing, the narrative threads along which Jack’s father slides.

“Those are the parts of a novel that are so outside myself that necessitate me becoming a schoolboy again. But going back into one’s personal historyThat was, I suppose, as my wife accurately put it, seven years of self-abuse.”

The book is not prohibitively dark, however; there are moments — especially at the end — of joy and triumph. “The characters themselves are finally rewarded for the pain they’ve gone through,” he says. It seems Irving too was rewarded: Like most of his other novels, the 822-page Until I Find You was an instant best-seller. His depression has passed — but whether the book was entirely cathartic for him is another matter.

“I wouldn’t be so foolish as to promise that the missing-parent subject is not going to make an appearance in another John Irving novel. But I don’t imagine that I will ever feel under such obligation to write about those things as I felt in writing this novel.”