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If a few novelists enjoy an peak period, where they achieve the summit repeatedly, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s extended through a sequence of several long, gratifying novels, from his late-seventies success The World According to Garp to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. These were expansive, witty, warm books, tying figures he describes as “outsiders” to cultural themes from gender equality to termination.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been waning results, save in word count. His last work, 2022’s The Chairlift Book, was 900 pages of themes Irving had examined more effectively in prior books (mutism, dwarfism, trans issues), with a lengthy screenplay in the center to fill it out – as if filler were required.

Thus we come to a recent Irving with reservation but still a small glimmer of expectation, which burns brighter when we discover that His Queen Esther Novel – a only four hundred thirty-two pages in length – “returns to the world of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties book is part of Irving’s finest works, located largely in an orphanage in St Cloud’s, Maine, run by Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer.

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

In The Cider House Rules, Irving explored termination and identity with vibrancy, wit and an all-encompassing compassion. And it was a important book because it moved past the subjects that were evolving into repetitive tics in his books: grappling, ursine creatures, Vienna, sex work.

Queen Esther opens in the fictional town of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where the Winslow couple adopt young ward Esther from the orphanage. We are a few years prior to the storyline of His Earlier Novel, yet Dr Larch remains recognisable: already using ether, adored by his staff, beginning every talk with “At St Cloud's...” But his appearance in Queen Esther is confined to these early scenes.

The Winslows are concerned about raising Esther well: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how might they help a adolescent girl of Jewish descent find herself?” To answer that, we move forward to Esther’s adulthood in the Roaring Twenties. She will be involved of the Jewish exodus to Palestine, where she will enter Haganah, the Jewish nationalist armed group whose “purpose was to protect Jewish communities from opposition” and which would subsequently become the foundation of the Israeli Defense Forces.

These are massive themes to tackle, but having brought in them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that this book is not really about St Cloud’s and Dr Larch, it’s all the more disappointing that it’s also not really concerning the main character. For reasons that must connect to story mechanics, Esther becomes a surrogate mother for a different of the Winslows’ daughters, and delivers to a son, Jimmy, in World War II era – and the majority of this story is Jimmy’s story.

And here is where Irving’s preoccupations return strongly, both regular and distinct. Jimmy goes to – of course – the city; there’s talk of avoiding the Vietnam draft through bodily injury (Owen Meany); a pet with a significant name (the dog's name, recall the earlier dog from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, streetwalkers, writers and penises (Irving’s passim).

The character is a more mundane persona than the heroine promised to be, and the supporting characters, such as students the pair, and Jimmy’s teacher Annelies Eissler, are flat as well. There are several nice scenes – Jimmy deflowering; a confrontation where a couple of thugs get beaten with a walking aid and a bicycle pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not ever been a nuanced author, but that is not the problem. He has always repeated his ideas, foreshadowed story twists and let them to accumulate in the reader’s mind before leading them to resolution in extended, surprising, amusing sequences. For case, in Irving’s books, physical elements tend to be lost: think of the tongue in Garp, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those absences resonate through the story. In Queen Esther, a central character loses an limb – but we just learn thirty pages before the end.

She comes back toward the end in the book, but just with a eleventh-hour feeling of ending the story. We do not learn the full story of her life in Palestine and Israel. The book is a failure from a author who previously gave such pleasure. That’s the bad news. The positive note is that The Cider House Rules – upon rereading together with this novel – still remains wonderfully, 40 years on. So choose the earlier work in its place: it’s much longer as Queen Esther, but 12 times as great.