🔗 Share this article

If a few authors experience an golden period, where they reach the summit repeatedly, then American writer John Irving’s extended through a series of several long, gratifying novels, from his 1978 breakthrough His Garp Novel to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. These were expansive, humorous, warm novels, linking characters he refers to as “misfits” to societal topics from gender equality to abortion.

Following Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing outcomes, aside from in word count. His most recent work, 2022’s The Chairlift Book, was 900 pages of themes Irving had examined more effectively in previous novels (selective mutism, dwarfism, gender identity), with a lengthy script in the heart to pad it out – as if filler were needed.

Thus we look at a latest Irving with caution but still a tiny glimmer of hope, which burns brighter when we discover that Queen Esther – a mere four hundred thirty-two pages in length – “returns to the universe of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties book is part of Irving’s finest books, located mostly in an orphanage in Maine's St Cloud’s, managed by Wilbur Larch and his protege Wells.

This novel is a letdown from a novelist who previously gave such pleasure

In Cider House, Irving explored pregnancy termination and acceptance with colour, wit and an total empathy. And it was a important book because it abandoned the subjects that were turning into repetitive patterns in his novels: the sport of wrestling, wild bears, Austrian capital, sex work.

The novel starts in the imaginary community of New Hampshire's Penacook in the twentieth century's dawn, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow adopt young ward the title character from the orphanage. We are a several generations before the action of His Earlier Novel, yet Wilbur Larch stays familiar: already addicted to anesthetic, beloved by his nurses, opening every address with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his appearance in Queen Esther is limited to these early parts.

The couple fret about raising Esther properly: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how might they help a adolescent Jewish female understand her place?” To address that, we move forward to Esther’s later life in the 1920s. She will be involved of the Jewish exodus to the region, where she will join Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary force whose “goal was to protect Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would later establish the foundation of the Israel's military.

Such are massive subjects to take on, but having introduced them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s disappointing that the novel is not actually about St Cloud's and Wilbur Larch, it’s still more disheartening that it’s additionally not focused on the main character. For motivations that must relate to plot engineering, Esther turns into a substitute parent for one more of the couple's daughters, and gives birth to a baby boy, Jimmy, in 1941 – and the bulk of this book is his tale.

And now is where Irving’s fixations reappear loudly, both common and specific. Jimmy moves to – naturally – Vienna; there’s mention of avoiding the military conscription through self-harm (Owen Meany); a dog with a meaningful title (the animal, meet the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as grappling, streetwalkers, authors and genitalia (Irving’s recurring).

He is a duller character than the heroine promised to be, and the minor characters, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s instructor Annelies Eissler, are underdeveloped too. There are several enjoyable episodes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a confrontation where a few bullies get assaulted with a walking aid and a tire pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has never been a delicate novelist, but that is is not the difficulty. He has consistently repeated his ideas, hinted at plot developments and allowed them to accumulate in the viewer's mind before bringing them to resolution in extended, jarring, entertaining scenes. For instance, in Irving’s novels, anatomical features tend to disappear: recall the tongue in Garp, the finger in Owen Meany. Those losses reverberate through the plot. In Queen Esther, a key person is deprived of an limb – but we only discover thirty pages before the conclusion.

Esther returns toward the end in the book, but just with a last-minute impression of wrapping things up. We do not do find out the entire account of her experiences in Palestine and Israel. This novel is a letdown from a novelist who once gave such joy. That’s the bad news. The upside is that His Classic Novel – revisiting it alongside this novel – even now remains wonderfully, four decades later. So choose the earlier work as an alternative: it’s double the length as Queen Esther, but far as good.