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If some writers enjoy an peak phase, during which they reach the summit repeatedly, then American novelist John Irving’s extended through a run of several long, rewarding works, from his late-seventies breakthrough The World According to Garp to 1989’s His Owen Meany Book. These were expansive, funny, big-hearted novels, linking characters he refers to as “misfits” to social issues from women's rights to termination.

Following Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing returns, aside from in size. His previous novel, the 2022 release The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages long of themes Irving had explored more skillfully in earlier books (inability to speak, short stature, transgenderism), with a two-hundred-page screenplay in the center to fill it out – as if padding were needed.

So we come to a new Irving with care but still a faint flame of hope, which glows hotter when we find out that Queen Esther – a mere 432 pages in length – “returns to the world of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties work is part of Irving’s top-tier novels, taking place largely in an children's home in the town of St Cloud’s, managed by Dr Larch and his apprentice Wells.

Queen Esther is a disappointment from a author who once gave such pleasure

In His Cider House Novel, Irving discussed abortion and belonging with richness, wit and an all-encompassing empathy. And it was a important novel because it abandoned the themes that were turning into tiresome tics in his novels: the sport of wrestling, bears, Vienna, prostitution.

The novel opens in the fictional community of Penacook, New Hampshire in the twentieth century's dawn, where Thomas and Constance Winslow take in young ward Esther from St Cloud's home. We are a a number of years before the events of His Earlier Novel, yet Wilbur Larch is still familiar: already using the drug, adored by his staff, beginning every talk with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his presence in this novel is limited to these early parts.

The family fret about bringing up Esther well: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how might they help a young Jewish girl find herself?” To address that, we move forward to Esther’s later life in the twenties era. She will be a member of the Jewish emigration to the area, where she will join Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary organisation whose “purpose was to protect Jewish settlements from hostile actions” and which would later establish the basis of the Israel's military.

Those are huge themes to tackle, but having presented them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s disappointing that Queen Esther is not actually about the orphanage and Dr Larch, it’s even more disappointing that it’s also not focused on the titular figure. For motivations that must involve plot engineering, Esther ends up as a surrogate mother for another of the couple's children, and delivers to a baby boy, Jimmy, in the early forties – and the majority of this story is the boy's story.

And now is where Irving’s fixations return strongly, both typical and specific. Jimmy goes to – naturally – the Austrian capital; there’s discussion of evading the draft notice through bodily injury (His Earlier Book); a dog with a meaningful name (Hard Rain, meet the canine from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as grappling, streetwalkers, writers and penises (Irving’s recurring).

Jimmy is a more mundane figure than the heroine promised to be, and the supporting players, such as young people the pair, and Jimmy’s instructor Annelies Eissler, are one-dimensional as well. There are some nice set pieces – Jimmy losing his virginity; a fight where a few ruffians get assaulted with a support and a air pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not ever been a nuanced writer, but that is not the problem. He has consistently restated his ideas, hinted at narrative turns and allowed them to gather in the reader’s imagination before leading them to fruition in lengthy, shocking, amusing moments. For case, in Irving’s works, physical elements tend to go missing: think of the oral part in Garp, the finger in Owen Meany. Those missing pieces echo through the narrative. In this novel, a major person is deprived of an upper extremity – but we just find out 30 pages the end.

Esther reappears in the final part in the story, but just with a eleventh-hour feeling of ending the story. We do not discover the complete narrative of her experiences in the Middle East. This novel is a letdown from a writer who once gave such joy. That’s the negative aspect. The good news is that Cider House – upon rereading together with this novel – yet stands up wonderfully, four decades later. So read the earlier work as an alternative: it’s much longer as the new novel, but a dozen times as enjoyable.