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If a few authors experience an peak phase, in which they reach the summit repeatedly, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s ran through a run of several long, gratifying works, from his late-seventies success The World According to Garp to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were rich, humorous, compassionate novels, tying protagonists he refers to as “outliers” to social issues from women's rights to reproductive rights.

Following Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing outcomes, except in page length. His last book, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was nine hundred pages of topics Irving had explored better in previous novels (mutism, short stature, trans issues), with a 200-page film script in the middle to extend it – as if padding were necessary.

So we come to a new Irving with care but still a tiny flame of hope, which glows stronger when we discover that Queen Esther – a only 432 pages – “goes back to the world of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties book is one of Irving’s top-tier novels, taking place largely in an institution in the town of St Cloud’s, operated by Dr Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer.

Queen Esther is a letdown from a writer who in the past gave such delight

In Cider House, Irving wrote about termination and belonging with colour, wit and an comprehensive understanding. And it was a significant book because it moved past the themes that were becoming annoying habits in his works: the sport of wrestling, bears, Austrian capital, the oldest profession.

This book begins in the made-up community of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow take in 14-year-old orphan the protagonist from St Cloud’s. We are a few generations prior to the action of The Cider House Rules, yet Dr Larch is still familiar: still using ether, beloved by his caregivers, beginning every address with “At St Cloud's...” But his role in Queen Esther is restricted to these early scenes.

The couple fret about parenting Esther correctly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how could they help a adolescent girl of Jewish descent find herself?” To answer that, we move forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the 1920s. She will be a member of the Jewish exodus to the region, where she will become part of the Haganah, the Zionist militant force whose “goal was to defend Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would later form the basis of the IDF.

Those are enormous topics to tackle, but having presented them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s disappointing that the novel is not really about the orphanage and Wilbur Larch, it’s all the more disappointing that it’s also not focused on the main character. For causes that must connect to story mechanics, Esther ends up as a substitute parent for a different of the Winslows’ children, and gives birth to a male child, the boy, in the early forties – and the bulk of this novel is Jimmy’s story.

And now is where Irving’s obsessions reappear loudly, both typical and particular. Jimmy relocates to – of course – Vienna; there’s talk of avoiding the military conscription through bodily injury (His Earlier Book); a dog with a symbolic title (the animal, recall the canine from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, sex workers, novelists and penises (Irving’s recurring).

The character is a duller persona than the heroine promised to be, and the secondary characters, such as pupils the pair, and Jimmy’s teacher Annelies Eissler, are flat too. There are several nice set pieces – Jimmy losing his virginity; a fight where a few ruffians get beaten with a walking aid and a bicycle pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has not ever been a subtle writer, but that is not the difficulty. He has consistently reiterated his points, hinted at story twists and let them to build up in the audience's mind before taking them to resolution in lengthy, jarring, entertaining scenes. For example, in Irving’s novels, body parts tend to go missing: think of the speech organ in Garp, the digit in Owen Meany. Those missing pieces echo through the story. In this novel, a central person suffers the loss of an upper extremity – but we merely discover 30 pages later the end.

Esther reappears late in the story, but merely with a eleventh-hour feeling of wrapping things up. We never discover the entire narrative of her experiences in the Middle East. Queen Esther is a disappointment from a novelist who previously gave such joy. That’s the negative aspect. The good news is that The Cider House Rules – I reread it in parallel to this novel – yet remains excellently, four decades later. So pick up the earlier work in its place: it’s twice as long as Queen Esther, but 12 times as great.