WHEN IT HIT THE STREETS in 1977, The World According to Garp turned an obscure novelist named John Irving into a resident of Great American Writer-hood.

Indeed Garp was that rare thing: a serious popular novel that emerged at a time when, if you wrote fiction, you could be an exponent of airport trash; seriously literary; or allied with the American nouveau roman gang who were “deconstructing narrative” and revelled in not being reader friendly.

But throughout his career, Irving hasn’t just been reader friendly; he’s championed “the big story”, brimming with quirky detail and contrivances, while addressing the search for some sort of safe shelter amid life’s absurd vicissitudes.

No doubt his loyal readership will greet the arrival of Until I Find You with hosannas — as it has all the essential Irving attributes: an interest in the grotesque and the wilder frontiers of sex, plus a hefty narrative in which the theme of “the lost father” looms large.

Until I Find You follows the picaresque life of one Jack Burns. Jack has deeply eccentric origins. His father, a church organist and tattoo fetishist, has vanished and in the early part of the novel, set in the late 1960s, Jack finds himself accompanying his equally bizarre mother, Alice, on a peregrination through Scandinavia in search of this absent man. Along the way, Alice shows phenomenal prowess in body painting and general quotidian survival.

But then Jack ends up in (wait for it) an all-girls school in Toronto — where his sexual experiences are by no means pleasant ones — before finding his way into New England preppiedom, and eventually discovering success as an actor in Hollywood. But though (like his creator) he wins a screenplay Oscar, Jack is a private mess — haunted by his tortured relationship with older women, unable to control his seething anger, and still desperately searching for Daddy.

Yes, this is a novel where the lost “Inner Child” looms large throughout. Speaking about his hero’s stint with a therapist, Irving notes: “(As) the unfinished telling of his life went on and on, Jack had become . . . a writer, albeit one given to melancholic logorrhea.”

In many ways, Until I Find You suffers from the same sort of logorrhea. It’s too damn long and never seems to know when to rein itself in. Naturally, you have to admire Irving’s descriptive talents — his deft detailing of a plethora of landscapes and cultures. Similarly, its ambitious scope and its manifold questions about the nature of individual identity, all merit praise. But such virtues are undermined by narrative fat. There’s also a view of sex that veers between the brutal and a wink-wink-nudge-nudge sensibility, and a central character who, once famous, is open to prosaic self-pity.

And yet despite this, the book’s internal engine keeps you motoring on. At its best, the novel addresses, with great emotional complexity, the innate loneliness of life. At its worst, it strays far too often into that territory marked “naff”. It’s one of those curious books that can touch a deep resonant chord within you one moment, and exasperate several pages later. As such, it’s a messy sprawl. But I did keep turning the page — and that speaks multitudes about Irving’s talents as a storyteller.

UNTIL I FIND YOU
By John Irving
Bloomsbury, £18.99; 822pp
£17.09 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Douglas Kennedy’s new novel, State of the Union, is published by Hutchinson in October by John Irving

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