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If some novelists experience an imperial era, in which they achieve the summit time after time, then U.S. author John Irving’s ran through a sequence of several long, rewarding novels, from his 1978 hit The World According to Garp to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were expansive, witty, big-hearted books, linking protagonists he calls “misfits” to social issues from gender equality to termination.

Following A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been declining returns, save in page length. His previous novel, 2022’s His Last Chairlift Novel, was 900 pages long of subjects Irving had examined better in prior books (selective mutism, dwarfism, trans issues), with a two-hundred-page film script in the center to extend it – as if extra material were necessary.

So we approach a new Irving with caution but still a small glimmer of hope, which shines hotter when we find out that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages long – “revisits the universe of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties work is one of Irving’s top-tier books, located mostly in an institution in the town of St Cloud’s, operated by Dr Larch and his apprentice Homer Wells.

This novel is a disappointment from a novelist who once gave such joy

In His Cider House Novel, Irving discussed pregnancy termination and acceptance with vibrancy, comedy and an all-encompassing empathy. And it was a major work because it moved past the topics that were evolving into annoying patterns in his novels: wrestling, bears, the city of Vienna, sex work.

This book begins in the imaginary town of New Hampshire's Penacook in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow adopt teenage ward the protagonist from St Cloud’s. We are a several decades before the storyline of His Earlier Novel, yet Dr Larch is still familiar: still addicted to anesthetic, beloved by his caregivers, opening every speech with “At St Cloud's...” But his presence in the book is confined to these opening sections.

The couple are concerned about parenting Esther properly: she’s Jewish, and “how might they help a adolescent Jewish girl understand her place?” To address that, we flash forward to Esther’s adulthood in the Roaring Twenties. She will be part of the Jewish exodus to Palestine, where she will join the Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary force whose “goal was to safeguard Jewish communities from hostile actions” and which would subsequently form the core of the Israel's military.

These are enormous subjects to tackle, but having presented them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that this book is hardly about St Cloud's and Wilbur Larch, it’s even more upsetting that it’s likewise not about Esther. For causes that must involve story mechanics, Esther ends up as a gestational carrier for a different of the couple's daughters, and delivers to a son, James, in World War II era – and the majority of this book is his tale.

And now is where Irving’s obsessions reappear loudly, both common and distinct. Jimmy relocates to – of course – the Austrian capital; there’s mention of avoiding the Vietnam draft through bodily injury (His Earlier Book); a dog with a significant title (the dog's name, recall Sorrow from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as grappling, streetwalkers, novelists and male anatomy (Irving’s passim).

Jimmy is a duller persona than the female lead hinted to be, and the secondary figures, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s teacher Annelies Eissler, are flat as well. There are several enjoyable scenes – Jimmy deflowering; a fight where a couple of bullies get battered with a support and a air pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not once been a subtle author, but that is is not the problem. He has repeatedly restated his arguments, foreshadowed plot developments and allowed them to accumulate in the viewer's imagination before taking them to fruition in long, jarring, funny scenes. For case, in Irving’s novels, body parts tend to disappear: recall the tongue in Garp, the finger in His Owen Book. Those absences resonate through the story. In Queen Esther, a major figure is deprived of an limb – but we merely discover thirty pages later the finish.

The protagonist reappears toward the end in the story, but only with a final sense of wrapping things up. We never do find out the entire account of her time in the Middle East. This novel is a disappointment from a author who in the past gave such pleasure. That’s the negative aspect. The positive note is that His Classic Novel – revisiting it alongside this novel – yet remains excellently, after forty years. So read it in its place: it’s much longer as this book, but far as good.