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If certain novelists experience an golden period, in which they hit the heights consistently, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s lasted through a sequence of four long, rewarding books, from his late-seventies breakthrough His Garp Novel to the 1989 release Owen Meany. Those were generous, funny, warm books, linking characters he refers to as “misfits” to social issues from feminism to abortion.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been declining results, except in page length. His most recent book, 2022’s The Chairlift Book, was nine hundred pages of topics Irving had explored more skillfully in earlier works (mutism, short stature, trans issues), with a lengthy script in the center to extend it – as if padding were necessary.

So we approach a recent Irving with caution but still a small flame of hope, which shines stronger when we learn that His Queen Esther Novel – a just 432 pages long – “returns to the setting of The Cider House Rules”. That 1985 novel is part of Irving’s finest books, taking place primarily in an institution in St Cloud’s, Maine, run by Dr Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer.

Queen Esther is a letdown from a novelist who in the past gave such pleasure

In His Cider House Novel, Irving wrote about termination and belonging with richness, wit and an all-encompassing empathy. And it was a major novel because it moved past the subjects that were turning into tiresome tics in his books: grappling, wild bears, Austrian capital, prostitution.

Queen Esther starts in the made-up village of Penacook, New Hampshire in the twentieth century's dawn, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow take in 14-year-old ward Esther from St Cloud’s. We are a few decades prior to the storyline of The Cider House Rules, yet Wilbur Larch is still identifiable: even then addicted to ether, adored by his nurses, starting every talk with “In this place...” But his presence in Queen Esther is limited to these early parts.

The couple fret about parenting Esther well: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how could they help a teenage girl of Jewish descent understand her place?” To tackle that, we move forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the 1920s. She will be part of the Jewish exodus to the area, where she will enter the Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary force whose “mission was to protect Jewish communities from Arab attacks” and which would later become the basis of the Israeli Defense Forces.

These are massive themes to take on, but having introduced them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that the novel is hardly about the orphanage and Wilbur Larch, it’s still more disappointing that it’s likewise not really concerning Esther. For reasons that must connect to plot engineering, Esther becomes a surrogate mother for a different of the family's offspring, and gives birth to a male child, Jimmy, in the early forties – and the bulk of this novel is his story.

And now is where Irving’s obsessions return strongly, both common and specific. Jimmy goes to – where else? – the city; there’s mention of dodging the Vietnam draft through self-mutilation (His Earlier Book); a dog with a meaningful title (the dog's name, meet the canine from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, streetwalkers, authors and penises (Irving’s recurring).

Jimmy is a duller character than the female lead suggested to be, and the minor players, such as pupils Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s tutor the tutor, are one-dimensional as well. There are some nice scenes – Jimmy deflowering; a confrontation where a couple of bullies get assaulted with a walking aid and a tire pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has never been a delicate author, but that is not the issue. He has always restated his points, telegraphed story twists and enabled them to build up in the audience's mind before taking them to resolution in lengthy, shocking, amusing sequences. For case, in Irving’s novels, physical elements tend to go missing: recall the oral part in The Garp Novel, the finger in Owen Meany. Those losses reverberate through the plot. In Queen Esther, a key figure is deprived of an upper extremity – but we just learn thirty pages the end.

She reappears toward the end in the novel, but merely with a final feeling of ending the story. We do not learn the complete story of her experiences in the region. The book is a letdown from a author who once gave such pleasure. That’s the negative aspect. The upside is that The Cider House Rules – revisiting it in parallel to this work – still holds up excellently, after forty years. So read it as an alternative: it’s much longer as Queen Esther, but 12 times as good.