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If certain writers experience an peak period, where they reach the summit time after time, then U.S. author John Irving’s ran through a sequence of several long, rewarding books, from his late-seventies breakthrough His Garp Novel to 1989’s His Owen Meany Book. Those were expansive, funny, warm works, tying figures he describes as “outsiders” to cultural themes from feminism to reproductive rights.

Since Owen Meany, it’s been waning returns, save in page length. His most recent work, the 2022 release The Chairlift Book, was nine hundred pages in length of themes Irving had explored better in previous novels (inability to speak, short stature, transgenderism), with a two-hundred-page screenplay in the heart to pad it out – as if extra material were required.

So we look at a recent Irving with care but still a small spark of expectation, which glows brighter when we find out that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages – “goes back to the world of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties book is among Irving’s very best works, located mostly in an institution in the town of St Cloud’s, managed by Dr Larch and his protege Homer.

Queen Esther is a failure from a writer who once gave such joy

In The Cider House Rules, Irving discussed pregnancy termination and belonging with vibrancy, humor and an all-encompassing compassion. And it was a significant work because it moved past the subjects that were becoming tiresome tics in his books: grappling, ursine creatures, Vienna, prostitution.

This book begins in the imaginary community of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where the Winslow couple welcome teenage foundling the protagonist from St Cloud’s. We are a few decades prior to the events of The Cider House Rules, yet Dr Larch remains familiar: even then using ether, beloved by his nurses, opening every speech with “In this place...” But his presence in this novel is confined to these opening parts.

The couple worry about parenting Esther well: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how might they help a teenage girl of Jewish descent understand her place?” To answer that, we flash forward to Esther’s later life in the twenties era. She will be a member of the Jewish exodus to the area, where she will enter Haganah, the Jewish nationalist armed group whose “mission was to safeguard Jewish communities from opposition” and which would subsequently establish the foundation of the IDF.

These are massive themes to address, but having introduced them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s disappointing that the novel is not actually about St Cloud’s and the doctor, it’s still more upsetting that it’s additionally not about the titular figure. For reasons that must involve plot engineering, Esther ends up as a gestational carrier for another of the Winslows’ daughters, and gives birth to a baby boy, Jimmy, in 1941 – and the bulk of this book is Jimmy’s story.

And now is where Irving’s preoccupations return strongly, both common and distinct. Jimmy moves to – of course – the Austrian capital; there’s talk of avoiding the draft notice through bodily injury (Owen Meany); a pet with a meaningful designation (the animal, remember the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, streetwalkers, novelists and genitalia (Irving’s recurring).

He is a duller figure than the heroine suggested to be, and the supporting figures, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor the tutor, are flat as well. There are several amusing set pieces – Jimmy deflowering; a brawl where a few bullies get assaulted with a crutch and a bicycle pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not ever been a nuanced novelist, but that is not the difficulty. He has consistently repeated his points, foreshadowed plot developments and enabled them to gather in the viewer's thoughts before leading them to fruition in extended, jarring, amusing sequences. For instance, in Irving’s works, physical elements tend to disappear: recall the oral part in Garp, the finger in His Owen Book. Those losses reverberate through the story. In the book, a major person is deprived of an arm – but we just learn 30 pages later the conclusion.

The protagonist comes back late in the book, but just with a final impression of ending the story. We not once do find out the complete story of her time in Palestine and Israel. This novel is a disappointment from a novelist who previously gave such joy. That’s the downside. The upside is that His Classic Novel – I reread it alongside this book – still remains excellently, 40 years on. So choose that as an alternative: it’s twice as long as this book, but far as good.