The damaged child inside the man

John IRVING has made no secret of his admiration for Charles Dickens. In his 1979 essay “The King of the Novel,” reprinted in the collection “Trying to Save Piggy Sneed,” Irving articulates standards by which he wishes his own fiction to be judged. He extols Dickens’ plot and character development, sentimentality, high and low comedy, unpretentious imagery, social liberalism and emphasis on what Dickens’ father-in-law called “the follies and absurdities of human nature.”

Irving’s doorstopper of an 11th novel, “Until I Find You,” again demonstrates his Dickensian proclivities while revisiting many pet themes, subjects and settings in a more directly autobiographical vein. But it’s a big book mainly in bulk. Despite its acknowledged personal connection, the overall effect is less emotionally compelling than “The Cider House Rules” or “A Prayer for Owen Meany.”

“Until I Find You” is a bildungsroman about a movie star named Jack Burns who suffers from a lifelong obsession with his missing father. Irving’s admission in a recent pre-publication interview with the New York Times of a lifelong curiosity about the biological father he never knew -- a curiosity he had long denied -- should have come as no surprise to his fans: Irving’s fiction is filled with fatherless sons.

Jack’s mother, Alice, is a tattoo artist who never forgives William Burns for leaving her. In a desperate gambit to win back this unfaithful church organist and “ink addict,” Alice drags 4-year-old Jack through various North Sea ports in pursuit of him. They visit Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki and Amsterdam -- wherever there’s a confluence of good church organs and tattoo artists. Ultimately, they retreat to Toronto, where Jack grows up fatherless, bearing a load of psychic baggage.

At 826 pages, “Until I Find You” is Irving’s longest novel to date. As always, his writing is enormously readable and accessible. His prose is determinedly straightforward and clear. Irving is a compulsive, wildly inventive storyteller, and the length gives him room not just for Jack’s life story but for rollicking synopses of Jack’s movies, the plots of Jack’s best friend’s bizarre-noir novels and various characters’ back stories.

But if you’re going to ask your readers to weight-lift, you want to make sure every ounce counts. Plot twists, tangents, leitmotifs and even authorial interjections and scenes replayed from different perspectives can all be justified. It’s harder to make a convincing case for heavy-handed foreshadowing: “The older-woman thing ... would haunt Jack Burns all his life,” or “Jack Burns was twenty-three. Emma Oastler was thirty. Boy, were their lives about to change!” Spelling out the obvious adds more narrative flab, as does repetition.

The first section of “Until I Find You” presents Jack and Alice’s strange travelogue through the seamy underworld of 1970 hippie-maritime tattoo parlors and red-light districts, filtered through the often confused perspective of a preschooler who we later learn has been deliberately misled. Jack’s adult reinterpretations of memories from that early odyssey dominate the second half of the novel. An epigraph from William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow” has alerted us that Irving’s concern is with the mutability of memory, which shares a lot with storytelling. “So much of what you think you remember is a lie, the stuff of postcards,” Jack comments, when he returns to those North Sea ports as an adult.

Like many of Dickens’ best characters, Jack Burns is a great fool -- a naif who gets sucked into all sorts of fixes. He’s a Teflon hero who remains blameless despite his many sexual transgressions because he’s a victim and a perpetual innocent. But the same nonstick surface prevents Jack from feeling anything very deeply, and in turn prevents the reader from feeling much for Jack -- at least until Irving’s redemptive climax. This renders “Until I Find You” less moving than Irving might have wished.

Pumped full of stories about his father’s philandering ways and repeatedly told that he has William’s lady-killer eyelashes, Jack seems destined to fulfill everyone’s worst expectations. From earliest childhood he’s a magnet for sexually abusive older women. (Irving also recently revealed that he had been molested by an older woman when he was 11.) In Los Angeles, as a movie star famous for cross-dressing roles, Jack is targeted by conniving underage girls as well as transsexuals. “Until I Find You” teems with devious, deviant, predatory, controlling women. Even Jack’s therapist is “a bitch psychiatrist.”

In Irving’s novels, lust is often punished with mutilation -- characters lose their hands, their tongues or their genitals, not to mention their lives. Here the most abused body part is Jack’s penis; he’s subjected to a warped sexual education by several older girls in his Toronto grade school, who keep testing its ability to grow and ejaculate. Unfortunately, Irving’s penchant for penile prurience seems more weird than weighty or winsome.

As an unhappy adult, Jack wonders why he was such an easy target for abuse. He realizes that women “must have observed a certain absence of the mothering instinct in Alice.” A recurring theme in Irving’s fiction is the prime parental obligation to protect one’s children: A good parent puts his or her children first and never stops worrying about their welfare. Jack’s mother is painted -- at least by Jack’s reassessing adult eye -- as a monster of neglect of Dickensian proportions.

Irving populates his novel with a cast of colorful oddballs -- although many of the tattooists run together like bleeding ink. Most fully realized is Jack’s self-appointed protector, Emma, a novelist who (like Irving) displays “sympathy for damaged, deeply compromised relationships that somehow work.” In keeping with the memorable last line from his breakthrough fourth novel -- “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases” -- several characters die during “Until I Find You,” often in outlandish drownings. One death comes as a deflating blow to the narrative, leaving a hole akin to that left when the best actor in a play exits permanently in Act 1.

Irving revisits several favorite locales and subjects, including Exeter, wrestling and prostitution. Fresher, but unfortunately not quite fascinating enough to warrant all the pages lavished on it, is his foray into the world of tattooing. A writer’s mandate, whether working to 19th or 21st century standards, is to be interesting. Anything else reads like self-indulgence -- or like a lack of perspective or editing. “Until I Find You,” an often stunningly visual novel, is burdened by bloat. One can easily imagine a pared-down, vivid film version. *