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INKEDblog takes you beneath the skin of today's tattoo culture. Our mission is to celebrate tattooing as a modern art form which incorporates art, fashion, style, and pop culture. While paying homage and respect to the past, we look to present a contemporary take on the present and future of skin art.
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Wednesday Jul 27, 2005
John Irving Takes You Into The Parlors
John Irving’s new novel, Until I Find You centers (mostly) around an actor attempting to locate his father and a sense of identity. The son of a tattoo artist, prostitute, and sexually abusive mother named Daughter Alice, much of the novel involves hero Jack Burns’ attempts to track down his tattoo-addicted father – a church organist with the goal of covering his skin in its entirety.
This 800 page novel is, to be honest, John Irving at his worst. Irving’s writing is tedious, and he seems to be recycling his same old scenes of childhood abandonment and wrestling to increasingly less effect.
The novel’s saving grace, however, is its warm, detailed, and realistic depiction of tattoo parlors. Irving’s obviously done his homework – as Jack’s mother takes him across Northern Europe at age 4 to look for his father, the reader gets a detailed and loving tour of tattoo culture, learning such things as that a heavily tattooed body is highly sensitive to the cold.
If you love tattoos, there are parts of this book that you’ll find interesting and entertaining. But if you love good books, you won’t be finding one here.
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