🔗 Share this article

If some novelists experience an imperial period, in which they hit the pinnacle consistently, then American novelist John Irving’s ran through a series of four substantial, rewarding books, from his late-seventies breakthrough Garp to the 1989 release His Owen Meany Book. Those were generous, humorous, warm works, connecting characters he calls “misfits” to societal topics from women's rights to abortion.

Following A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing results, save in page length. His last work, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was nine hundred pages long of topics Irving had explored more effectively in earlier works (selective mutism, restricted growth, gender identity), with a lengthy script in the heart to pad it out – as if padding were needed.

Therefore we come to a new Irving with reservation but still a faint glimmer of optimism, which glows brighter when we learn that Queen Esther – a mere four hundred thirty-two pages in length – “returns to the universe of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties book is among Irving’s very best books, located mostly in an children's home in the town of St Cloud’s, managed by Dr Larch and his assistant Homer.

Queen Esther is a letdown from a writer who previously gave such joy

In The Cider House Rules, Irving wrote about abortion and identity with vibrancy, wit and an total compassion. And it was a major work because it abandoned the themes that were becoming annoying tics in his books: the sport of wrestling, ursine creatures, the city of Vienna, sex work.

Queen Esther opens in the made-up community of New Hampshire's Penacook in the twentieth century's dawn, where Thomas and Constance Winslow welcome teenage orphan the protagonist from the orphanage. We are a a number of years ahead of the action of His Earlier Novel, yet Wilbur Larch stays familiar: still dependent on the drug, respected by his nurses, beginning every speech with “In this place...” But his presence in the book is restricted to these early scenes.

The couple worry about bringing up Esther well: she’s Jewish, and “in what way could they help a teenage girl of Jewish descent find herself?” To tackle that, we jump ahead to Esther’s later life in the Roaring Twenties. She will be part of the Jewish emigration to the region, where she will become part of the paramilitary group, the Zionist paramilitary organisation whose “purpose was to safeguard Jewish communities from opposition” and which would later become the basis of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Those are enormous themes to take on, but having brought in them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that this book is not actually about St Cloud's and Dr Larch, it’s still more disheartening that it’s likewise not about Esther. For causes that must relate to story mechanics, Esther becomes a substitute parent for a different of the family's children, and delivers to a male child, the boy, in the early forties – and the bulk of this novel is Jimmy’s tale.

And now is where Irving’s preoccupations reappear loudly, both typical and distinct. Jimmy goes to – naturally – Vienna; there’s discussion of avoiding the military conscription through bodily injury (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a dog with a significant title (Hard Rain, remember the earlier dog from His Hotel Novel); as well as wrestling, streetwalkers, writers and genitalia (Irving’s recurring).

Jimmy is a duller figure than the female lead promised to be, and the secondary players, such as students the two students, and Jimmy’s instructor Eissler, are flat also. There are several amusing episodes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a fight where a handful of ruffians get beaten with a crutch and a air pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has never been a delicate author, but that is not the difficulty. He has repeatedly restated his ideas, foreshadowed plot developments and let them to gather in the reader’s thoughts before taking them to completion in lengthy, shocking, entertaining scenes. For example, in Irving’s novels, anatomical features tend to disappear: think of the tongue in The Garp Novel, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those losses echo through the plot. In this novel, a central character suffers the loss of an arm – but we only discover thirty pages later the finish.

The protagonist reappears late in the novel, but only with a final feeling of wrapping things up. We never discover the entire account of her experiences in the region. This novel is a letdown from a writer who previously gave such pleasure. That’s the downside. The positive note is that His Classic Novel – upon rereading alongside this novel – still holds up excellently, 40 years on. So read the earlier work instead: it’s much longer as this book, but a dozen times as great.