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If certain authors enjoy an golden era, where they hit the summit consistently, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s extended through a sequence of four substantial, rewarding works, from his 1978 success The World According to Garp to the 1989 release Owen Meany. Those were rich, witty, big-hearted novels, linking characters he refers to as “outsiders” to social issues from women's rights to abortion.

After A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing outcomes, aside from in page length. His most recent novel, the 2022 release The Chairlift Book, was nine hundred pages of subjects Irving had explored more effectively in prior works (mutism, dwarfism, trans issues), with a two-hundred-page film script in the center to extend it – as if padding were necessary.

So we look at a new Irving with caution but still a tiny flame of hope, which glows stronger when we learn that His Queen Esther Novel – a mere four hundred thirty-two pages long – “revisits the world of The Cider House Novel”. That 1985 novel is part of Irving’s very best works, set primarily in an children's home in St Cloud’s, Maine, managed by Wilbur Larch and his protege Wells.

Queen Esther is a disappointment from a novelist who once gave such delight

In Cider House, Irving explored pregnancy termination and identity with richness, humor and an all-encompassing understanding. And it was a significant book because it abandoned the themes that were becoming annoying patterns in his works: wrestling, ursine creatures, Austrian capital, sex work.

This book starts in the imaginary community of the Penacook area in the early 20th century, where the Winslow couple take in young foundling the protagonist from the orphanage. We are a several generations before the storyline of His Earlier Novel, yet Wilbur Larch is still identifiable: even then addicted to ether, respected by his caregivers, starting every speech with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his appearance in the book is restricted to these initial scenes.

The Winslows are concerned about raising Esther correctly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “in what way could 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 involved of the Jewish emigration to Palestine, where she will enter Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary group whose “purpose was to defend Jewish settlements from opposition” and which would eventually become the foundation of the Israel's military.

Those are enormous themes to tackle, but having presented them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s disappointing that the novel is hardly about the orphanage and Wilbur Larch, it’s still more disappointing that it’s also not focused on Esther. For causes that must involve plot engineering, Esther turns into a gestational carrier for one more of the Winslows’ children, and gives birth to a baby boy, Jimmy, in 1941 – and the majority of this story is the boy's story.

And here is where Irving’s fixations reappear loudly, both typical and particular. Jimmy goes to – naturally – Vienna; there’s discussion of avoiding the draft notice through bodily injury (Owen Meany); a canine with a meaningful designation (the animal, remember Sorrow from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, sex workers, writers and male anatomy (Irving’s passim).

He is a duller persona than the heroine hinted to be, and the minor players, such as young people the pair, and Jimmy’s instructor Eissler, are one-dimensional as well. There are a few enjoyable scenes – Jimmy losing his virginity; a fight where a handful of thugs get beaten with a crutch and a bicycle pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has not ever been a subtle novelist, but that is not the issue. He has repeatedly repeated his arguments, telegraphed story twists and let them to build up in the reader’s thoughts before leading them to resolution in lengthy, surprising, entertaining moments. For example, in Irving’s works, body parts tend to go missing: recall the tongue in The Garp Novel, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those missing pieces resonate through the plot. In the book, a central character suffers the loss of an limb – but we just learn thirty pages before the finish.

The protagonist comes back in the final part in the novel, but merely with a final sense of wrapping things up. We never learn the complete account of her life in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a failure from a author who previously gave such delight. That’s the downside. The positive note is that The Cider House Rules – I reread it alongside this book – even now stands up wonderfully, after forty years. So read it as an alternative: it’s double the length as this book, but far as good.