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If a few authors enjoy an imperial era, where they reach the summit consistently, then U.S. writer John Irving’s ran through a sequence of several fat, rewarding novels, from his 1978 hit Garp to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were expansive, witty, big-hearted books, connecting protagonists he refers to as “outliers” to social issues from feminism to reproductive rights.

After A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been declining results, except in page length. His most recent novel, 2022’s His Last Chairlift Novel, was nine hundred pages of topics Irving had examined more effectively in previous novels (mutism, short stature, gender identity), with a 200-page screenplay in the heart to pad it out – as if filler were needed.

Thus we come to a recent Irving with caution but still a faint spark of expectation, which burns brighter when we find out that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages long – “goes back to the world of His Cider House Rules”. That 1985 work is one of Irving’s top-tier novels, located largely in an institution in Maine's St Cloud’s, run by Dr Larch and his apprentice Wells.

The book is a failure from a author who in the past gave such joy

In Cider House, Irving explored pregnancy termination and belonging with colour, humor and an all-encompassing understanding. And it was a important book because it abandoned the themes that were becoming repetitive patterns in his books: grappling, ursine creatures, Austrian capital, prostitution.

The novel opens in the imaginary village of Penacook, New Hampshire in the twentieth century's dawn, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow take in 14-year-old foundling Esther from St Cloud's home. We are a few decades ahead of the storyline of His Earlier Novel, yet the doctor remains familiar: already using the drug, adored by his nurses, opening every address with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his presence in the book is confined to these early sections.

The couple worry about raising Esther correctly: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how might they help a teenage Jewish female discover her identity?” To answer that, we jump ahead to Esther’s grown-up years in the Roaring Twenties. She will be involved of the Jewish migration to the area, where she will enter the paramilitary group, the pro-Zionist armed group whose “mission was to safeguard Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would subsequently become the basis of the IDF.

These are huge subjects 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 disappointing that it’s likewise not really concerning Esther. For motivations that must involve narrative construction, Esther becomes a surrogate mother for one more of the couple's offspring, and bears to a baby boy, the boy, in 1941 – and the majority of this novel is Jimmy’s narrative.

And here is where Irving’s fixations return strongly, both typical and specific. Jimmy relocates to – naturally – the city; there’s discussion of avoiding the military conscription through self-harm (His Earlier Book); a dog with a symbolic title (the animal, remember the canine from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, streetwalkers, authors and penises (Irving’s recurring).

Jimmy is a duller character than the heroine promised to be, and the secondary players, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s teacher Annelies Eissler, are flat also. There are some enjoyable episodes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a confrontation where a couple of thugs get beaten with a walking aid and a air pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has not ever been a nuanced novelist, but that is is not the problem. He has always restated his points, telegraphed story twists and let them to build up in the audience's thoughts before taking them to fruition in long, surprising, entertaining sequences. For case, in Irving’s books, body parts tend to be lost: recall the speech organ in The Garp Novel, the hand part in His Owen Book. Those absences resonate through the narrative. In the book, a key person loses an limb – but we only find out thirty pages the conclusion.

She returns in the final part in the book, but merely with a final impression of wrapping things up. We not once discover the full account of her experiences in the region. This novel is a letdown from a writer who once gave such pleasure. That’s the negative aspect. The upside is that His Classic Novel – I reread it together with this work – even now holds up beautifully, after forty years. So read it as an alternative: it’s much longer as Queen Esther, but far as enjoyable.