🔗 Share this article

If some novelists enjoy an peak period, in which they hit the pinnacle time after time, then American novelist John Irving’s lasted through a sequence of four long, gratifying books, from his late-seventies success His Garp Novel to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. These were expansive, funny, compassionate works, linking characters he calls “outliers” to cultural themes from women's rights to termination.

After A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been declining returns, aside from in size. His most recent book, the 2022 release The Chairlift Book, was nine hundred pages of topics Irving had examined better in prior works (mutism, restricted growth, gender identity), with a 200-page screenplay in the middle to pad it out – as if padding were necessary.

So we come to a recent Irving with care but still a tiny spark of expectation, which burns brighter when we learn that His Queen Esther Novel – a mere four hundred thirty-two pages in length – “returns to the universe of The Cider House Rules”. That 1985 work is among Irving’s top-tier novels, set primarily in an institution in St Cloud’s, Maine, operated by Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer Wells.

This novel is a failure from a author who once gave such pleasure

In Cider House, Irving explored pregnancy termination and belonging with richness, humor and an comprehensive understanding. And it was a important novel because it moved past the subjects that were becoming repetitive patterns in his books: grappling, wild bears, Vienna, sex work.

The novel opens in the imaginary town of New Hampshire's Penacook in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow welcome 14-year-old ward the title character from St Cloud’s. We are a several decades before the events of Cider House, yet Wilbur Larch stays identifiable: even then addicted to ether, beloved by his nurses, starting every address with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his role in Queen Esther is confined to these early sections.

The couple worry about bringing up Esther well: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how might they help a adolescent girl of Jewish descent find herself?” To answer that, we flash forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the twenties era. She will be involved of the Jewish emigration to the area, where she will join the paramilitary group, the Zionist armed group whose “mission was to protect Jewish communities from hostile actions” and which would eventually form the core of the Israel's military.

Such are huge topics to take on, but having brought in them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that this book is hardly about the orphanage and Dr Larch, it’s even more disheartening that it’s additionally not about Esther. For motivations that must connect to story mechanics, Esther ends up as a surrogate mother for another of the Winslows’ daughters, and bears to a son, the boy, in the early forties – and the majority of this story is the boy's narrative.

And now is where Irving’s preoccupations come roaring back, both typical and particular. Jimmy goes to – naturally – Vienna; there’s discussion of avoiding the draft notice through self-mutilation (Owen Meany); a dog with a significant title (the animal, recall the canine from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, streetwalkers, novelists and male anatomy (Irving’s recurring).

Jimmy is a more mundane persona than Esther promised to be, and the supporting figures, such as pupils Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s teacher Eissler, are one-dimensional as well. There are several nice episodes – Jimmy losing his virginity; a confrontation where a couple of thugs get battered with a crutch and a bicycle pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has never been a subtle author, but that is is not the problem. He has repeatedly repeated his arguments, foreshadowed narrative turns and enabled them to accumulate in the reader’s mind before leading them to completion in lengthy, surprising, amusing scenes. For case, in Irving’s novels, body parts tend to be lost: recall the tongue in Garp, the digit in Owen Meany. Those absences echo through the story. In Queen Esther, a central person suffers the loss of an arm – but we merely discover 30 pages the finish.

She comes back toward the end in the story, but just with a final feeling of ending the story. We not once learn the complete account of her time in the region. Queen Esther is a letdown from a author who once gave such joy. That’s the downside. The upside is that The Cider House Rules – I reread it alongside this book – still remains wonderfully, after forty years. So pick up it as an alternative: it’s double the length as this book, but far as enjoyable.