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If a few writers have an golden phase, in which they reach the summit time after time, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s ran through a run of several long, satisfying books, from his late-seventies breakthrough His Garp Novel to 1989’s His Owen Meany Book. These were generous, funny, warm novels, connecting figures he calls “outsiders” to social issues from feminism to termination.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been waning outcomes, save in word count. His last book, the 2022 release The Last Chairlift, was 900 pages of subjects Irving had explored more effectively in earlier works (inability to speak, short stature, trans issues), with a lengthy script in the center to fill it out – as if filler were needed.

So we come to a recent Irving with reservation but still a small flame of expectation, which burns hotter when we discover that His Queen Esther Novel – a only four hundred thirty-two pages in length – “revisits the setting of His Cider House Rules”. That 1985 novel is one of Irving’s top-tier books, located primarily in an orphanage in the town of St Cloud’s, managed by Dr Larch and his apprentice Homer Wells.

This novel is a disappointment from a novelist who once gave such joy

In The Cider House Rules, Irving wrote about abortion and acceptance with vibrancy, humor and an total understanding. And it was a significant book because it abandoned the subjects that were turning into annoying habits in his works: the sport of wrestling, bears, Austrian capital, the oldest profession.

Queen Esther begins in the fictional town of New Hampshire's Penacook in the twentieth century's dawn, where Thomas and Constance Winslow take in young foundling the title character from the orphanage. We are a a number of years before the events of His Earlier Novel, yet Dr Larch stays identifiable: already using the drug, respected by his caregivers, starting every address with “At St Cloud's...” But his role in Queen Esther is restricted to these early parts.

The couple are concerned about parenting Esther well: she’s Jewish, and “in what way could they help a teenage girl of Jewish descent understand her place?” To address that, we jump ahead to Esther’s adulthood in the Roaring Twenties. She will be a member of the Jewish exodus to Palestine, where she will join Haganah, the Jewish nationalist armed organisation whose “mission was to safeguard Jewish communities from Arab attacks” and which would eventually establish the foundation of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Those are huge themes to tackle, but having introduced them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s disappointing that this book is not actually about the orphanage and Dr Larch, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s also not really concerning Esther. For reasons that must connect to narrative construction, Esther ends up as a substitute parent for a different of the Winslows’ offspring, and delivers to a male child, Jimmy, in 1941 – and the bulk of this book is Jimmy’s story.

And here is where Irving’s fixations reappear loudly, both common and specific. Jimmy moves to – naturally – the Austrian capital; there’s talk of evading the military conscription through self-mutilation (His Earlier Book); a dog with a symbolic title (the dog's name, remember Sorrow from His Hotel Novel); as well as grappling, prostitutes, writers and penises (Irving’s recurring).

Jimmy is a more mundane character than Esther promised to be, and the supporting characters, such as young people the pair, and Jimmy’s instructor Eissler, are one-dimensional as well. There are several enjoyable scenes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a fight where a couple of ruffians get assaulted with a support and a tire pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has never been a subtle author, but that is is not the difficulty. He has repeatedly repeated his arguments, hinted at story twists and enabled them to gather in the reader’s imagination before taking them to completion in long, jarring, entertaining moments. For example, in Irving’s books, anatomical features tend to be lost: think of the speech organ in Garp, the digit in Owen Meany. Those losses echo through the narrative. In the book, a key figure suffers the loss of an arm – but we only learn 30 pages later the finish.

The protagonist returns late in the story, but merely with a last-minute sense of concluding. We not once discover the complete account of her time in Palestine and Israel. The book is a letdown from a author who in the past gave such pleasure. That’s the bad news. The good news is that The Cider House Rules – upon rereading together with this work – still stands up excellently, four decades later. So choose it as an alternative: it’s twice as long as the new novel, but a dozen times as enjoyable.