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If a few novelists have an imperial era, where they achieve the summit repeatedly, then American author John Irving’s lasted through a run of four fat, gratifying novels, from his 1978 hit Garp to 1989’s Owen Meany. These were generous, humorous, compassionate works, linking characters he refers to as “misfits” to social issues from women's rights to abortion.

Following A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been waning returns, aside from in size. His most recent work, the 2022 release The Chairlift Book, was nine hundred pages of topics Irving had examined more skillfully in prior books (mutism, dwarfism, gender identity), with a 200-page script in the middle to pad it out – as if extra material were needed.

Thus we come to a recent Irving with reservation but still a faint spark of hope, which burns brighter when we find out that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages – “revisits the universe of The Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties novel is one of Irving’s very best books, set mostly in an orphanage in St Cloud’s, Maine, operated by Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Wells.

The book is a failure from a writer who previously gave such delight

In His Cider House Novel, Irving wrote about pregnancy termination and acceptance with richness, humor and an total understanding. And it was a major novel because it left behind the subjects that were turning into tiresome tics in his novels: the sport of wrestling, bears, Austrian capital, the oldest profession.

Queen Esther starts in the imaginary town of New Hampshire's Penacook in the beginning of the 1900s, where Thomas and Constance Winslow welcome young ward Esther from St Cloud’s. We are a few generations ahead of the events of Cider House, yet Wilbur Larch stays identifiable: already using ether, respected by his caregivers, beginning every talk with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his appearance in the book is limited to these opening sections.

The Winslows fret about parenting Esther correctly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how could they help a teenage Jewish female find herself?” To address that, we flash forward to Esther’s adulthood in the Roaring Twenties. She will be a member of the Jewish exodus to the area, where she will enter the Haganah, the pro-Zionist paramilitary force whose “purpose was to safeguard Jewish settlements from Arab attacks” and which would eventually become the foundation of the Israel's military.

Such are huge topics to address, but having introduced them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s disappointing that Queen Esther is hardly about St Cloud's and Wilbur Larch, it’s even more disappointing that it’s additionally not really concerning the titular figure. For motivations that must connect to plot engineering, Esther ends up as a gestational carrier for another of the couple's offspring, and delivers to a baby boy, the boy, in the early forties – and the bulk of this story is the boy's story.

And at this point is where Irving’s fixations return strongly, both typical and particular. Jimmy moves to – of course – the Austrian capital; there’s talk of dodging the military conscription through bodily injury (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a canine with a symbolic title (the animal, remember the canine from His Hotel Novel); as well as wrestling, streetwalkers, writers and genitalia (Irving’s throughout).

Jimmy is a duller persona than the female lead promised to be, and the supporting characters, such as young people the pair, and Jimmy’s instructor Eissler, are flat too. There are several enjoyable episodes – Jimmy deflowering; a fight where a couple of ruffians get beaten with a support and a tire pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not once been a nuanced author, but that is is not the difficulty. He has consistently restated his ideas, foreshadowed narrative turns and enabled them to gather in the reader’s thoughts before bringing them to fruition in extended, jarring, entertaining sequences. For case, in Irving’s novels, anatomical features tend to go missing: recall the oral part in The Garp Novel, the finger in Owen Meany. Those missing pieces resonate through the narrative. In this novel, a major person suffers the loss of an arm – but we only find out 30 pages before the conclusion.

Esther comes back late in the story, but only with a last-minute impression of wrapping things up. We not once learn the complete account of her life in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a disappointment from a author who once gave such delight. That’s the bad news. The positive note is that The Cider House Rules – revisiting it together with this novel – even now remains beautifully, four decades later. So read the earlier work instead: it’s double the length as this book, but far as great.