🔗 Share this article

If some writers have an peak phase, in which they hit the pinnacle repeatedly, then U.S. author John Irving’s lasted through a run of four fat, satisfying books, from his late-seventies breakthrough The World According to Garp to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were expansive, witty, big-hearted books, tying protagonists he describes as “outsiders” to cultural themes from gender equality to termination.

Since Owen Meany, it’s been waning returns, aside from in page length. His most recent novel, the 2022 release The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages long of subjects Irving had explored more effectively in previous works (mutism, restricted growth, transgenderism), with a two-hundred-page film script in the center to pad it out – as if padding were required.

Thus we come to a new Irving with caution but still a tiny flame of optimism, which glows stronger when we learn that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages in length – “revisits the world of The Cider House Novel”. That 1985 novel is one of Irving’s finest novels, located primarily in an children's home in the town of St Cloud’s, run by Wilbur Larch and his protege Wells.

The book is a letdown from a novelist who once gave such delight

In Cider House, Irving discussed termination and identity with richness, humor and an total compassion. And it was a significant book because it abandoned the topics that were becoming annoying patterns in his novels: grappling, wild bears, Vienna, prostitution.

This book opens in the made-up village of New Hampshire's Penacook in the twentieth century's dawn, where the Winslow couple adopt young foundling the title character from St Cloud's home. We are a several generations ahead of the action of Cider House, yet the doctor stays familiar: already addicted to the drug, adored by his caregivers, opening every talk with “At St Cloud's...” But his role in this novel is confined to these opening parts.

The couple fret about parenting Esther properly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “in what way could they help a adolescent Jewish female find herself?” To address that, we flash forward to Esther’s later life in the Roaring Twenties. She will be involved of the Jewish exodus to the area, where she will enter Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary group whose “purpose was to safeguard Jewish towns from opposition” and which would later become the core of the IDF.

Such are huge topics to tackle, but having presented them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s frustrating that the novel is not really about St Cloud’s and Dr Larch, it’s all the more disappointing that it’s additionally not about the titular figure. For motivations that must relate to narrative construction, Esther turns into a surrogate mother for another of the family's daughters, and delivers to a baby boy, the boy, in 1941 – and the majority of this novel is the boy's narrative.

And now is where Irving’s preoccupations come roaring back, both typical and particular. Jimmy goes to – naturally – the city; there’s mention of dodging the Vietnam draft through self-harm (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a pet with a symbolic name (the dog's name, recall the canine from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as grappling, prostitutes, novelists and penises (Irving’s throughout).

Jimmy is a duller character than Esther suggested to be, and the supporting players, such as pupils the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor the tutor, are flat as well. There are some nice scenes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a brawl where a few ruffians get beaten with a crutch and a bicycle pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not ever been a subtle author, but that is not the issue. He has repeatedly restated his ideas, telegraphed plot developments and allowed them to accumulate in the viewer's thoughts before taking them to resolution in long, shocking, amusing sequences. For example, in Irving’s books, body parts tend to be lost: remember the speech organ in Garp, the finger in His Owen Book. Those losses resonate through the plot. In this novel, a key character loses an upper extremity – but we merely find out 30 pages before the conclusion.

The protagonist comes back in the final part in the book, but only with a eleventh-hour sense of wrapping things up. We not once learn the complete account of her experiences in the Middle East. Queen Esther is a disappointment from a novelist who previously gave such joy. That’s the bad news. The positive note is that The Cider House Rules – revisiting it together with this book – yet stands up excellently, four decades later. So choose it as an alternative: it’s much longer as this book, but far as good.