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If some novelists enjoy an golden phase, where they hit the heights repeatedly, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s extended through a sequence of four fat, rewarding novels, from his 1978 breakthrough The World According to Garp to the 1989 release Owen Meany. Those were expansive, humorous, compassionate works, connecting figures he refers to as “outliers” to social issues from gender equality to termination.

After A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been waning outcomes, aside from in size. His most recent work, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was 900 pages long of subjects Irving had examined more effectively in prior novels (inability to speak, restricted growth, transgenderism), with a 200-page film script in the middle to extend it – as if extra material were necessary.

Therefore we approach a recent Irving with reservation but still a small glimmer of expectation, which glows hotter when we discover that Queen Esther – a only four hundred thirty-two pages long – “goes back to the setting of The Cider House Rules”. That 1985 book is one of Irving’s finest books, located primarily in an children's home in St Cloud’s, Maine, run by Dr Wilbur Larch and his protege Wells.

Queen Esther is a failure from a novelist who previously gave such joy

In Cider House, Irving discussed termination and belonging with richness, comedy and an total understanding. And it was a important work because it abandoned the topics that were turning into annoying tics in his works: grappling, bears, the city of Vienna, sex work.

Queen Esther starts in the made-up village of New Hampshire's Penacook in the early 20th century, where Thomas and Constance Winslow take in 14-year-old ward the protagonist from St Cloud's home. We are a few decades before the action of Cider House, yet the doctor remains familiar: still addicted to ether, adored by his caregivers, starting every speech with “In this place...” But his presence in this novel is limited to these opening scenes.

The Winslows fret about parenting Esther well: she’s of Jewish faith, and “in what way could they help a adolescent girl of Jewish descent find herself?” To address that, we flash forward to Esther’s adulthood in the twenties era. She will be part of the Jewish emigration to Palestine, where she will enter Haganah, the pro-Zionist paramilitary group whose “goal was to defend Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would later establish the basis of the IDF.

Those are huge themes to tackle, but having presented them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that the novel is hardly about the orphanage and the doctor, it’s still more upsetting that it’s also not really concerning Esther. For causes that must involve plot engineering, Esther becomes a surrogate mother for one more of the family's children, and bears to a baby boy, the boy, in the early forties – and the lion's share of this book is Jimmy’s tale.

And here is where Irving’s fixations come roaring back, both typical and distinct. Jimmy goes to – where else? – the Austrian capital; there’s discussion of evading the draft notice through bodily injury (His Earlier Book); a dog with a symbolic title (the animal, meet the canine from His Hotel Novel); as well as the sport, sex workers, novelists and genitalia (Irving’s recurring).

Jimmy is a more mundane figure than the heroine suggested to be, and the secondary players, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s teacher Annelies Eissler, are flat as well. There are a few nice set pieces – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a confrontation where a few thugs get assaulted with a walking aid and a tire pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not once been a delicate novelist, but that is isn't the difficulty. He has always reiterated his points, telegraphed story twists and enabled them to accumulate in the viewer's thoughts before bringing them to completion in long, shocking, entertaining scenes. For instance, in Irving’s works, anatomical features tend to disappear: recall the tongue in Garp, the finger in His Owen Book. Those missing pieces resonate through the narrative. In the book, a major character suffers the loss of an arm – but we merely find out thirty pages later the end.

She returns in the final part in the book, but just with a eleventh-hour sense of wrapping things up. We not once do find out the complete story of her life in the Middle East. This novel is a letdown from a writer who once gave such pleasure. That’s the downside. The upside is that His Classic Novel – I reread it together with this novel – still stands up wonderfully, after forty years. So pick up the earlier work as an alternative: it’s much longer as Queen Esther, but far as good.