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If certain novelists enjoy an peak phase, where they achieve the pinnacle time after time, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s extended through a series of several fat, gratifying books, from his late-seventies hit His Garp Novel to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Such were rich, humorous, compassionate works, linking characters he calls “outliers” to social issues from women's rights to termination.

After Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing outcomes, aside from in page length. His last novel, the 2022 release The Last Chairlift, was 900 pages long of themes Irving had explored more effectively in previous novels (inability to speak, dwarfism, trans issues), with a two-hundred-page screenplay in the center to fill it out – as if padding were needed.

Therefore we look at a new Irving with reservation but still a small spark of expectation, which shines hotter when we discover that Queen Esther – a mere four hundred thirty-two pages long – “revisits the setting of His Cider House Rules”. That 1985 novel is among Irving’s top-tier books, located mostly in an institution in the town of St Cloud’s, run by Dr Wilbur Larch and his protege Wells.

This novel is a letdown from a writer who in the past gave such pleasure

In His Cider House Novel, Irving discussed termination and belonging with vibrancy, comedy and an all-encompassing understanding. And it was a important book because it left behind the topics that were becoming annoying patterns in his novels: wrestling, ursine creatures, Austrian capital, sex work.

This book begins in the made-up community of the Penacook area in the early 20th century, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow welcome young orphan the protagonist from the orphanage. We are a few decades before the action of His Earlier Novel, yet Dr Larch remains identifiable: already using ether, respected by his nurses, beginning every speech with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his appearance in Queen Esther is confined to these initial sections.

The family are concerned about raising Esther properly: she’s from a Jewish background, and “in what way could they help a adolescent girl of Jewish descent discover her identity?” To address that, we flash forward to Esther’s later life in the 1920s. She will be a member of the Jewish migration to the region, where she will join the Haganah, the Jewish nationalist armed organisation whose “goal was to protect Jewish communities from hostile actions” and which would later become the foundation of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Such are massive topics to take on, but having presented them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s disappointing that Queen Esther is hardly about St Cloud’s and Wilbur Larch, it’s all the more upsetting that it’s also not about the main character. For causes that must connect to plot engineering, Esther becomes a surrogate mother for another of the couple's daughters, and gives birth to a baby boy, James, in World War II era – and the majority of this book is his narrative.

And here is where Irving’s obsessions return strongly, both typical and distinct. Jimmy relocates to – of course – Vienna; there’s discussion of dodging the draft notice through self-mutilation (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a pet with a meaningful designation (the dog's name, recall the earlier dog from His Hotel Novel); as well as the sport, sex workers, novelists and male anatomy (Irving’s throughout).

Jimmy is a duller persona than Esther promised to be, and the supporting figures, such as students the pair, and Jimmy’s tutor Eissler, are one-dimensional too. There are some enjoyable episodes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a fight where a handful of thugs get assaulted with a support and a air pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has never been a nuanced novelist, but that is is not the problem. He has always repeated his arguments, telegraphed narrative turns and let them to gather in the audience's mind before taking them to resolution in extended, surprising, amusing scenes. For example, in Irving’s books, anatomical features tend to go missing: recall the oral part in Garp, the hand part in His Owen Book. Those losses reverberate through the plot. In Queen Esther, a major person is deprived of an limb – but we only discover 30 pages later the end.

She returns toward the end in the book, but just with a final feeling of ending the story. We do not discover the full narrative of her experiences in Palestine and Israel. The book is a letdown from a novelist who once gave such delight. That’s the downside. The good news is that His Classic Novel – upon rereading in parallel to this novel – even now stands up beautifully, four decades later. So read it as an alternative: it’s double the length as Queen Esther, but 12 times as great.