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If some novelists experience an peak era, where they achieve the summit repeatedly, then U.S. writer John Irving’s lasted through a series of several fat, rewarding books, from his 1978 hit His Garp Novel to the 1989 release His Owen Meany Book. These were generous, witty, big-hearted novels, tying characters he refers to as “outliers” to cultural themes from gender equality to termination.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been waning returns, save in word count. His last work, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was nine hundred pages of themes Irving had explored more effectively in earlier works (mutism, dwarfism, gender identity), with a 200-page screenplay in the center to fill it out – as if padding were needed.

Therefore we come to a recent Irving with care but still a small spark of expectation, which glows hotter when we find out that Queen Esther – a only 432 pages in length – “returns to the universe of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties novel is one of Irving’s finest works, taking place primarily in an institution in Maine's St Cloud’s, run by Dr Larch and his apprentice Wells.

This novel is a letdown from a novelist who in the past gave such pleasure

In Cider House, Irving explored abortion and acceptance with richness, comedy and an total compassion. And it was a important novel because it moved past the themes that were turning into tiresome tics in his works: grappling, bears, Austrian capital, prostitution.

The novel starts in the imaginary town of the Penacook area in the twentieth century's dawn, where Thomas and Constance Winslow welcome young orphan the title character from St Cloud's home. We are a few years before the events of Cider House, yet the doctor is still familiar: already dependent on the drug, beloved by his caregivers, starting every speech with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his appearance in Queen Esther is limited to these opening parts.

The Winslows worry about bringing up Esther correctly: she’s Jewish, and “in what way could they help a teenage Jewish girl discover her identity?” To answer that, we jump ahead to Esther’s adulthood in the 1920s. She will be a member of the Jewish emigration to the region, where she will become part of Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary group whose “purpose was to safeguard Jewish settlements from opposition” and which would eventually become the basis of the Israel's military.

Such are huge themes to address, but having introduced them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s disappointing that the novel is hardly about St Cloud’s and the doctor, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s likewise not really concerning the main character. For motivations that must involve plot engineering, Esther turns into a gestational carrier for one more of the Winslows’ daughters, and bears to a son, the boy, in World War II era – and the bulk of this story is Jimmy’s narrative.

And at this point is where Irving’s obsessions come roaring back, both typical and distinct. Jimmy goes to – of course – the Austrian capital; there’s mention of dodging the military conscription through bodily injury (His Earlier Book); a canine with a significant title (Hard Rain, recall the canine from His Hotel Novel); as well as the sport, prostitutes, writers and male anatomy (Irving’s passim).

Jimmy is a more mundane figure than the female lead promised to be, and the supporting characters, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor Eissler, are one-dimensional too. There are a few enjoyable scenes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a brawl where a handful of bullies get beaten with a crutch and a air pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has never been a nuanced writer, but that is isn't the problem. He has always reiterated his points, telegraphed story twists and allowed them to accumulate in the reader’s imagination before taking them to completion in long, surprising, amusing moments. For case, in Irving’s novels, anatomical features tend to disappear: recall the speech organ in Garp, the digit in Owen Meany. Those losses echo through the plot. In the book, a central person is deprived of an arm – but we merely learn thirty pages before the end.

She returns late in the novel, but just with a eleventh-hour sense of ending the story. We do not do find out the full narrative of her experiences in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a failure from a novelist who in the past gave such pleasure. That’s the bad news. The upside is that Cider House – upon rereading in parallel to this book – even now holds up excellently, four decades later. So read that as an alternative: it’s double the length as Queen Esther, but far as good.