I finally got through this book. It took a while, and it wasn't easy I set it down a couple times. As much as I like John Irving (also wrote The World According to Garp, A Prayer For Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules....) this wasn't my favorite book by him. I had such high hopes, there's all these elements in the story that hit close to home for me. The main characters mother is a tattoo artist and his absent father is a church organist (my mom's an organist). Irving's books have a tendency to meander about seaming to go nowhere until mid way through you realize everything is connected and you need to start from the beginning because you were'nt paying close enough attention to the details. Somehow though this book never really brought it home for me.

I was so interested to see where he would go with the tattoo thing . It was fun to look for familiar names to be mentioned. " Jack called Hanky Panky at the house of pain in Amsterdam..... A group came from Italy....Manu and Tin Tin from France. The Las Vegas Pricks were there, and Holywood's Purple Panther ......They crammed the pews, where Ed Hardy , Bill Funk , and Rusty Savage appeared to have appointed themselves the old girls bodyguards" (hard to imagine Hardy as anyones body guard) then, "...a broad shouldered man in a bright yellow sports jacket....he had so much gel in his hair, which stood straight up, that the top of his head resembled a shark's dorsal fin, both were familiar to Jack from the tattoo magazines he'd seen - Crazy Philidelphia Eddie ; there could be no doubt"

Apparently Irving got two tattoos as "reseach" for the book and list several tattooers in his acknowledgements but as a tattooer some of his lingo gets annoying. "William would become an 'ink addict' a 'collector'......."he might be a full body" Throughout the book he refers to this idea that people who are covered in tattoos feel cold. I've never heard that one but when a cutomer walks in to the shop the tattooer looks at him and says, " 'You're a full body aren't you?' You couldn't see a tattoo on him - only a relentless chill" maybe someone was having a little fun with Irving making up stories.


p.s. The cover art on this book the worst! You would think meeting so many tattooers he might of had one of them design the cover artwork, of a tattoo.

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