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If a few authors have an imperial era, during which they achieve the summit consistently, then U.S. writer John Irving’s ran through a series of several long, rewarding novels, from his late-seventies breakthrough The World According to Garp to the 1989 release Owen Meany. These were rich, witty, warm books, tying characters he describes as “outliers” to social issues from gender equality to reproductive rights.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been declining outcomes, save in size. His previous book, 2022’s The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages in length of topics Irving had explored more skillfully in previous books (inability to speak, short stature, gender identity), with a lengthy screenplay in the center to pad it out – as if extra material were needed.

So we look at a new Irving with care but still a tiny glimmer of hope, which glows hotter when we find out that His Queen Esther Novel – a only four hundred thirty-two pages in length – “returns to the setting of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties book is part of Irving’s top-tier books, located largely in an children's home in the town of St Cloud’s, run by Dr Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Wells.

Queen Esther is a letdown from a author who once gave such pleasure

In Cider House, Irving explored abortion and acceptance with richness, comedy and an total understanding. And it was a significant work because it abandoned the topics that were turning into tiresome patterns in his books: the sport of wrestling, bears, Austrian capital, the oldest profession.

This book opens in the made-up village of New Hampshire's Penacook in the twentieth century's dawn, where the Winslow couple adopt teenage ward the title character from the orphanage. We are a few years prior to the events of The Cider House Rules, yet Wilbur Larch is still identifiable: still using ether, beloved by his staff, opening every talk with “In this place...” But his appearance in this novel is restricted to these early parts.

The couple are concerned about parenting Esther well: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how could they help a young Jewish girl find herself?” To tackle that, we move forward to Esther’s adulthood in the Roaring Twenties. She will be part of the Jewish exodus to the region, where she will join the Haganah, the Jewish nationalist militant force whose “mission was to protect Jewish settlements from opposition” and which would later establish the foundation of the Israel's military.

Such are massive themes to tackle, but having brought in them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s frustrating that this book is hardly about St Cloud’s and the doctor, it’s all the more upsetting that it’s also not about the main character. For reasons that must relate to story mechanics, Esther turns into a surrogate mother for another of the Winslows’ children, and delivers to a male child, the boy, in 1941 – and the majority of this book is Jimmy’s tale.

And here is where Irving’s preoccupations return strongly, both typical and particular. Jimmy relocates to – of course – the city; there’s discussion of evading the draft notice through self-mutilation (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a canine with a meaningful title (the dog's name, meet the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as grappling, prostitutes, novelists and genitalia (Irving’s recurring).

He is a duller persona than the heroine promised to be, and the minor characters, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s teacher Annelies Eissler, are underdeveloped too. There are several enjoyable episodes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a fight where a handful of ruffians get battered with a walking aid and a bicycle pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has never been a nuanced author, but that is not the issue. He has repeatedly restated his arguments, hinted at story twists and enabled them to accumulate in the audience's imagination before taking them to completion in lengthy, jarring, funny scenes. For case, in Irving’s books, body parts tend to disappear: remember the oral part in Garp, the hand part in His Owen Book. Those missing pieces resonate through the story. In Queen Esther, a central person loses an limb – but we merely find out thirty pages the finish.

Esther returns in the final part in the book, but only with a final feeling of ending the story. We never discover the entire narrative of her life in the Middle East. Queen Esther is a failure from a writer who once gave such delight. That’s the downside. The upside is that Cider House – upon rereading together with this book – yet remains beautifully, 40 years on. So read the earlier work as an alternative: it’s much longer as the new novel, but a dozen times as enjoyable.