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If a few authors enjoy an peak era, in which they achieve the heights repeatedly, then American author John Irving’s lasted through a sequence of four substantial, rewarding books, from his late-seventies breakthrough The World According to Garp to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were expansive, humorous, warm novels, linking protagonists he refers to as “misfits” to cultural themes from women's rights to abortion.

After Owen Meany, it’s been waning results, except in word count. His most recent work, the 2022 release The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages long of subjects Irving had delved into more effectively in prior works (inability to speak, dwarfism, trans issues), with a two-hundred-page script in the middle to extend it – as if filler were necessary.

Thus we come to a recent Irving with care but still a tiny flame of optimism, which glows stronger when we discover that His Queen Esther Novel – a just 432 pages in length – “revisits the universe of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties book is one of Irving’s top-tier works, taking place largely in an orphanage in St Cloud’s, Maine, managed by Dr Larch and his assistant Homer Wells.

The book is a disappointment from a author who in the past gave such pleasure

In The Cider House Rules, Irving explored abortion and acceptance with vibrancy, wit and an comprehensive compassion. And it was a major book because it abandoned the topics that were becoming repetitive habits in his books: grappling, ursine creatures, Austrian capital, sex work.

Queen Esther begins in the made-up town of the Penacook area in the twentieth century's dawn, where Thomas and Constance Winslow take in teenage foundling the title character from the orphanage. We are a several decades before the events of Cider House, yet Wilbur Larch is still identifiable: already using the drug, respected by his nurses, opening every talk with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his appearance in the book is limited to these initial scenes.

The couple are concerned about raising Esther well: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how might they help a young Jewish female discover her identity?” To answer that, we move forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the twenties era. She will be part of the Jewish exodus to Palestine, where she will become part of the paramilitary group, the Zionist paramilitary organisation whose “purpose was to defend Jewish towns from opposition” and which would eventually establish the foundation of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Those are massive topics to tackle, but having introduced them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that this book is not really about St Cloud’s and Wilbur Larch, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s also not focused on the titular figure. For reasons that must involve plot engineering, Esther turns into a surrogate mother for one more of the family's children, and delivers to a male child, Jimmy, in the early forties – and the lion's share of this book is his tale.

And at this point is where Irving’s obsessions come roaring back, both common and particular. Jimmy moves to – of course – the Austrian capital; there’s discussion of dodging the draft notice through self-harm (Owen Meany); a pet with a meaningful designation (the dog's name, remember the canine from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, sex workers, novelists and genitalia (Irving’s passim).

The character is a less interesting character than Esther hinted to be, and the supporting characters, such as students the pair, and Jimmy’s teacher Annelies Eissler, are underdeveloped also. There are several nice scenes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a confrontation where a handful of bullies get beaten with a support and a tire pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has never been a delicate novelist, but that is is not the issue. He has always repeated his arguments, foreshadowed plot developments and allowed them to gather in the reader’s thoughts before taking them to completion in extended, shocking, amusing moments. For instance, in Irving’s novels, anatomical features tend to disappear: recall the tongue in Garp, the digit in Owen Meany. Those missing pieces echo through the plot. In the book, a major character is deprived of an arm – but we merely learn 30 pages later the end.

She returns in the final part in the story, but only with a eleventh-hour feeling of concluding. We never do find out the complete account of her time in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a failure from a author who once gave such delight. That’s the downside. The positive note is that His Classic Novel – revisiting it alongside this novel – even now stands up wonderfully, after forty years. So pick up the earlier work as an alternative: it’s much longer as the new novel, but far as enjoyable.