The Grapes of Wrath is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It was my pick for the book group I do with my sisters. While one of them said she would have preferred a more conclusive ending, I thought the ending, though horrifying in so many ways, was perfect. Right after we finished it I put it on my Netflix queue and when the movie arrived I sat through about an hour or so and then turned it off, thinking I would finish it in the morning. Only when morning came I wasn’t really interested so I tucked the disc into the envelope, sealed it and sent it on its way. I felt like I was cheating. I read the book, I know the ending, and yet. It wasn’t a bad movie, by the way.
Steinbeck’s masterpiece is perched at one end of my spectrum, and unfortunately, at the other, is a novel called Until I Find You, by John Irving. I made it to page 480 – which is just barely past the halfway point – before I pulled my bookmark out and put the book back on the shelf, where it will sit until it’s thrust back into circulation via a donation.
It is horrid.
I really like John Irving. I thought Cider House Rules and Hotel New Hampshire were outstanding (although I was much younger when I read them). This book, on the other hand. It’s the story of Jack Burns, who grows up to be an actor, and his friend Emma, who grows up to be a novelist. Really, though, from the very beginning (when Jack is four years old) the book is a story about his penis. Although I read little more than half of it, I believe the narrative – if it can be called that – is structured around Jack’s relationship with his mother, Alice, a tattoo artist, and their search, together at times, for his father, who abandoned Alice before Jack was born. Emma and Jack meet in grade school in Toronto, where she becomes the master, if you will, of his penis, which is referred to over and over and over again as “the little guy.” Every time Emma says something to Jack her quote ends with “honey pie.” Hundreds and hundreds of times, Emma calls Jack “honey pie.” And many, many sentences in this novel end with an exclamation mark, which drives me nuts.
I didn’t quit reading the book for those three reasons alone (although they helped). I quit reading because it struck me as a stupid story populated by really, really unimaginatively created characters engaged in one cliché-laden situation after another. To me, it was a amateur comic book without any illustration. Jack’s mother Alice, for example, pairs up with Emma’s mother, whose name I cannot even recall, and they become lovers. Lesbians! Where that one fell down is that for me it didn’t seem to have much of an impact on any of the situations or characters. That, I fear, is because “the little guy” kept getting in the way.
The last I read, Emma died as a result of her vagina being too small to accommodate someone she’d brought home from a bar (I am not kidding) and it is revealed that Jack’s mother had breast cancer many years while he was away at boarding school (he’d wondered why his mother hadn’t come to visit but again, the little guy … ). The last scene I read there was an envelope on the kitchen table that Emma’s mother was suggesting Jack open.
What really prompted me to abandon the book, though, was this: Until I Find You is, according to one reviewer, “a mass of lazy, unrefined writing.” I normally avoid reviews until I’ve experienced whatever it is that’s being reviewed, but I made an exception in this case because I needed, desperately, to confirm one of two things: Either it really is a bad book, or I was missing something, really missing something.
It’s the former that I found. I didn’t read a single review that really praised Until I Find You. The review that most aligned with my impressions appeared in the Washington Post and was written by Marianne Wiggins. The paper ultimately apologized for the review – which was scathing – an event that was explained in a competing newspaper like this: “Wiggins wasn’t the only reviewer to dislike Irving’s book, but she was likely the only one once married to author Salman Rushdie, a longtime friend of Irving’s.”
While I detest the critics club – their fascination with one another negates their reviews as far as I’m concerned – regardless of her marital history, I did not quit reading Marianne Wiggin’s review until I reached the end. Here are a couple of the better lines: “The story reads as if Irving woke from a recurring nightmare and started dictating compulsively.” And, even better, “I hope I’m wrong to read this as a cry for help that it appears to be. It does go on and on, and someone, somewhere in the production line at Garp Entertprises, Ltd., should have advised John Irving not to rush to print until he’d crafted pain into art, as he’s done so masterfully before.” On my list of things I think the Washington Post should apologize for, those lines are pretty close to the bottom of my list.
