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If some novelists have an peak period, in which they reach the summit consistently, then U.S. author John Irving’s lasted through a series of several substantial, rewarding novels, from his late-seventies breakthrough His Garp Novel to the 1989 release Owen Meany. Such were rich, funny, compassionate works, linking figures he calls “outsiders” to social issues from gender equality to reproductive rights.

After His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been diminishing results, aside from in page length. His most recent work, the 2022 release The Last Chairlift, was 900 pages in length of themes Irving had examined more skillfully in previous novels (inability to speak, short stature, gender identity), with a 200-page film script in the middle to pad it out – as if filler were necessary.

Thus we come to a latest Irving with care but still a faint flame of hope, which burns hotter when we find out that Queen Esther – a only four hundred thirty-two pages – “returns to the world of The Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties book is one of Irving’s top-tier novels, set primarily in an children's home in St Cloud’s, Maine, run by Dr Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Homer Wells.

Queen Esther is a letdown from a writer who once gave such joy

In Cider House, Irving wrote about pregnancy termination and belonging with vibrancy, comedy and an comprehensive compassion. And it was a important book because it abandoned the subjects that were turning into tiresome patterns in his novels: wrestling, wild bears, Vienna, the oldest profession.

This book starts in the made-up village of the Penacook area in the early 20th century, where the Winslow couple take in teenage orphan the title character from the orphanage. We are a a number of decades ahead of the storyline of His Earlier Novel, yet Wilbur Larch is still familiar: already addicted to ether, adored by his staff, starting every speech with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his role in the book is restricted to these opening parts.

The family fret about bringing up Esther correctly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how could they help a adolescent Jewish girl find herself?” To address that, we jump ahead to Esther’s later life in the Roaring Twenties. She will be part of the Jewish exodus to the area, where she will enter the Haganah, the Jewish nationalist armed force whose “purpose was to safeguard Jewish settlements from opposition” and which would eventually form the basis of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Those are enormous topics to take on, but having brought in them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s disappointing that the novel is hardly about St Cloud's and Dr Larch, it’s even more disappointing that it’s also not about the main character. For motivations that must involve story mechanics, Esther becomes a gestational carrier for another of the couple's daughters, and delivers to a son, Jimmy, in 1941 – and the lion's share of this story is his narrative.

And now is where Irving’s preoccupations reappear loudly, both regular and specific. Jimmy goes to – where else? – Vienna; there’s mention of avoiding the Vietnam draft through self-mutilation (Owen Meany); a dog with a significant title (Hard Rain, meet Sorrow from His Hotel Novel); as well as grappling, sex workers, authors and penises (Irving’s passim).

Jimmy is a less interesting figure than Esther hinted to be, and the secondary characters, such as young people Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s tutor Eissler, are flat as well. There are several enjoyable set pieces – Jimmy losing his virginity; a fight where a handful of bullies get beaten with a support and a tire pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has not ever been a delicate novelist, but that is is not the issue. He has always restated his ideas, hinted at narrative turns and allowed them to accumulate in the audience's imagination before taking them to fruition in extended, jarring, funny scenes. For case, in Irving’s novels, body parts tend to be lost: think of the tongue in Garp, the finger in His Owen Book. Those missing pieces echo through the narrative. In Queen Esther, a central figure is deprived of an upper extremity – but we merely find out thirty pages before the conclusion.

She returns in the final part in the book, but only with a last-minute sense of ending the story. We not once discover the entire account of her life in the region. The book is a failure from a author who in the past gave such delight. That’s the bad news. The upside is that His Classic Novel – I reread it together with this novel – even now holds up beautifully, after forty years. So pick up it as an alternative: it’s twice as long as this book, but far as enjoyable.