🔗 Share this article

If some writers enjoy an peak era, during which they achieve the summit repeatedly, then U.S. writer John Irving’s lasted through a run of four substantial, gratifying books, from his 1978 breakthrough The World According to Garp to 1989’s Owen Meany. These were rich, humorous, compassionate works, linking characters he refers to as “outliers” to social issues from feminism to reproductive rights.

Following Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing returns, save in page length. His previous work, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was nine hundred pages in length of topics Irving had delved into more effectively in previous books (selective mutism, short stature, gender identity), with a lengthy script in the center to fill it out – as if extra material were needed.

Thus we approach a new Irving with reservation but still a tiny glimmer of optimism, which burns hotter when we find out that Queen Esther – a only 432 pages – “goes back to the setting of The Cider House Novel”. That 1985 work is one of Irving’s finest works, taking place largely in an orphanage in St Cloud’s, Maine, run by Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer Wells.

Queen Esther is a disappointment from a author who previously gave such joy

In The Cider House Rules, Irving explored abortion and belonging with richness, comedy and an total understanding. And it was a significant novel because it left behind the themes that were evolving into tiresome tics in his works: grappling, bears, Vienna, the oldest profession.

Queen Esther begins in the fictional village of Penacook, New Hampshire in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow take in teenage ward the title character from St Cloud's home. We are a a number of decades prior to the events of Cider House, yet Wilbur Larch remains recognisable: still addicted to the drug, adored by his nurses, beginning every address with “In this place...” But his appearance in this novel is restricted to these initial parts.

The family are concerned about bringing up Esther properly: she’s Jewish, 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 grown-up years in the twenties era. She will be a member of the Jewish migration to the area, where she will become part of Haganah, the Jewish nationalist armed force whose “mission was to defend Jewish towns from opposition” and which would later form the basis of the IDF.

Such are massive subjects to address, but having brought in them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that the novel is not really about the orphanage and the doctor, it’s all the more disappointing that it’s likewise not focused on the main character. For reasons that must relate to story mechanics, Esther ends up as a substitute parent for a different of the family's offspring, and gives birth to a son, Jimmy, in the early forties – and the majority of this novel is Jimmy’s story.

And here is where Irving’s obsessions return strongly, both regular and specific. Jimmy moves to – naturally – Vienna; there’s talk of evading the Vietnam draft through self-mutilation (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a dog with a significant name (the animal, recall the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as the sport, sex workers, writers and penises (Irving’s passim).

Jimmy is a duller character than the heroine promised to be, and the minor figures, such as young people Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s teacher Annelies Eissler, are underdeveloped also. There are some nice episodes – Jimmy deflowering; a fight where a couple of ruffians get battered with a support and a air pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has not ever been a delicate writer, but that is is not the problem. He has repeatedly restated his points, telegraphed plot developments and allowed them to gather in the reader’s imagination before bringing them to resolution in lengthy, surprising, funny sequences. For case, in Irving’s works, body parts tend to go missing: think of the oral part in Garp, the digit in His Owen Book. Those missing pieces resonate through the narrative. In Queen Esther, a major figure is deprived of an arm – but we just learn 30 pages before the finish.

Esther reappears late in the novel, but just with a final feeling of ending the story. We never do find out the entire story of her time in Palestine and Israel. The book is a failure from a novelist who once gave such pleasure. That’s the downside. The good news is that His Classic Novel – I reread it in parallel to this novel – even now stands up excellently, four decades later. So choose that in its place: it’s much longer as Queen Esther, but 12 times as good.