🔗 Share this article

If certain novelists experience an imperial phase, during which they achieve the heights repeatedly, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s ran through a series of four fat, satisfying novels, from his late-seventies breakthrough Garp to 1989’s His Owen Meany Book. Those were expansive, witty, big-hearted works, linking figures he calls “outsiders” to cultural themes from feminism to abortion.

Since His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been declining outcomes, save in word count. His last work, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was 900 pages long of topics Irving had examined better in previous novels (inability to speak, restricted growth, gender identity), with a 200-page script in the heart to pad it out – as if padding were required.

Therefore we come to a latest Irving with caution but still a tiny flame of expectation, which burns stronger when we find out that His Queen Esther Novel – a just four hundred thirty-two pages long – “returns to the setting of His Cider House Rules”. That 1985 work is part of Irving’s top-tier novels, taking place mostly in an children's home in St Cloud’s, Maine, operated by Wilbur Larch and his assistant Wells.

Queen Esther is a letdown from a writer who previously gave such delight

In The Cider House Rules, Irving wrote about termination and belonging with vibrancy, wit and an total compassion. And it was a major novel because it moved past the themes that were evolving into tiresome tics in his works: grappling, ursine creatures, Austrian capital, the oldest profession.

The novel begins in the imaginary village of New Hampshire's Penacook in the beginning of the 1900s, where Thomas and Constance Winslow welcome teenage orphan the title character from St Cloud’s. We are a few generations ahead of the storyline of His Earlier Novel, yet the doctor remains identifiable: even then using ether, respected by his staff, beginning every address with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his presence in this novel is limited to these initial sections.

The Winslows fret about bringing up Esther correctly: she’s from a Jewish background, and “in what way could they help a teenage girl of Jewish descent discover her identity?” To address that, we jump ahead to Esther’s later life in the twenties era. She will be part of the Jewish exodus to the region, where she will enter the paramilitary group, the Jewish nationalist militant group whose “purpose was to protect Jewish settlements from Arab attacks” and which would later establish the foundation of the IDF.

Such are enormous topics to address, but having introduced them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s disappointing that Queen Esther is not really about the orphanage and Dr Larch, it’s all the more upsetting that it’s additionally not really concerning Esther. For motivations that must involve plot engineering, Esther turns into a substitute parent for another of the family's children, and bears to a baby boy, Jimmy, in the early forties – and the majority of this book is his story.

And here is where Irving’s obsessions return strongly, both regular and particular. Jimmy relocates to – of course – the city; there’s talk of dodging the military conscription through self-harm (Owen Meany); a canine with a significant name (the animal, recall the canine from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as grappling, prostitutes, novelists and male anatomy (Irving’s recurring).

Jimmy is a less interesting figure than the heroine suggested to be, and the secondary figures, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s instructor Eissler, are underdeveloped too. There are some nice set pieces – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a brawl where a few thugs get beaten with a walking aid and a bicycle pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has never been a subtle author, but that is isn't the problem. He has always restated his arguments, telegraphed story twists and enabled them to build up in the viewer's mind before taking them to completion in extended, surprising, entertaining sequences. For example, in Irving’s books, anatomical features tend to be lost: recall the oral part in The Garp Novel, the finger in Owen Meany. Those losses resonate through the plot. In the book, a central person is deprived of an arm – but we only learn 30 pages the finish.

She reappears toward the end in the novel, but only with a last-minute feeling of wrapping things up. We never do find out the full narrative of her time in the region. Queen Esther is a failure from a novelist who once gave such pleasure. That’s the downside. The good news is that The Cider House Rules – revisiting it in parallel to this book – even now remains wonderfully, four decades later. So pick up it as an alternative: it’s twice as long as Queen Esther, but a dozen times as great.