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If a few writers experience an imperial period, where they reach the pinnacle time after time, then U.S. author John Irving’s lasted through a sequence of several long, gratifying works, from his late-seventies hit His Garp Novel to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. Such were generous, witty, warm novels, tying protagonists he calls “misfits” to social issues from feminism to abortion.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been diminishing results, except in page length. His last work, 2022’s The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages in length of subjects Irving had explored more skillfully in earlier works (inability to speak, short stature, transgenderism), with a lengthy script in the heart to extend it – as if padding were necessary.

Therefore we come to a new Irving with caution but still a tiny glimmer of optimism, which burns stronger when we find out that His Queen Esther Novel – a mere four hundred thirty-two pages – “returns to the world of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties book is one of Irving’s very best works, set largely in an children's home in the town of St Cloud’s, run by Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer Wells.

The book is a disappointment from a writer who previously gave such delight

In His Cider House Novel, Irving discussed pregnancy termination and belonging with richness, wit and an comprehensive empathy. And it was a important work because it left behind the subjects that were evolving into repetitive habits in his works: wrestling, wild bears, Austrian capital, prostitution.

Queen Esther starts in the imaginary town of Penacook, New Hampshire in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow adopt 14-year-old orphan Esther from St Cloud's home. We are a few years prior to the action of The Cider House Rules, yet Wilbur Larch stays familiar: even then using anesthetic, adored by his nurses, starting every talk with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his role in this novel is confined to these opening scenes.

The Winslows are concerned about raising Esther properly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “in what way could they help a young Jewish female find herself?” To answer that, we move forward to Esther’s adulthood in the twenties era. She will be part of the Jewish exodus to the area, where she will become part of Haganah, the pro-Zionist paramilitary force whose “goal was to defend Jewish settlements from hostile actions” and which would eventually become the core of the Israel's military.

These are huge topics to tackle, but having brought in them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s regrettable that this book is not actually about St Cloud’s and Wilbur Larch, it’s even more upsetting that it’s likewise not focused on the titular figure. For causes that must relate to story mechanics, Esther ends up as a gestational carrier for one more of the Winslows’ children, and delivers to a son, Jimmy, in 1941 – and the majority of this story is the boy's narrative.

And here is where Irving’s fixations come roaring back, both typical and specific. Jimmy moves to – where else? – the city; there’s talk of dodging the Vietnam draft through self-harm (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a dog with a symbolic designation (the dog's name, recall the canine from His Hotel Novel); as well as wrestling, prostitutes, novelists and male anatomy (Irving’s passim).

The character is a more mundane character than the heroine hinted to be, and the secondary figures, such as pupils the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor Annelies Eissler, are flat also. There are several nice set pieces – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a confrontation where a handful of bullies get battered with a support and a bicycle pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has never been a delicate author, but that is is not the difficulty. He has consistently reiterated his ideas, hinted at plot developments and let them to gather in the reader’s thoughts before taking them to fruition in long, surprising, amusing scenes. For case, in Irving’s novels, anatomical features tend to disappear: remember the tongue in Garp, the digit in Owen Meany. Those missing pieces resonate through the plot. In Queen Esther, a key character is deprived of an arm – but we only discover thirty pages before the conclusion.

She comes back in the final part in the book, but just with a eleventh-hour feeling of concluding. We not once learn the entire account of her experiences in Palestine and Israel. The book is a disappointment from a writer who in the past gave such delight. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Cider House – revisiting it together with this novel – even now remains wonderfully, 40 years on. So choose it as an alternative: it’s much longer as this book, but 12 times as enjoyable.