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If a few writers experience an peak era, where they achieve the pinnacle consistently, then American novelist John Irving’s extended through a run of several long, satisfying works, from his 1978 success Garp to the 1989 release Owen Meany. Such were generous, humorous, big-hearted works, linking figures he refers to as “misfits” to societal topics from feminism to termination.

Since Owen Meany, it’s been declining returns, aside from in word count. His last work, 2022’s The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages in length of subjects Irving had explored better in earlier books (selective mutism, restricted growth, gender identity), with a 200-page script in the middle to fill it out – as if extra material were necessary.

So we approach a latest Irving with reservation but still a small spark of hope, which burns brighter when we learn that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages long – “returns to the world of His Cider House Rules”. That 1985 work is one of Irving’s finest books, located mostly in an children's home in the town of St Cloud’s, managed by Dr Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer.

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

In The Cider House Rules, Irving discussed abortion and acceptance with richness, comedy and an all-encompassing empathy. And it was a major novel because it left behind the subjects that were evolving into tiresome tics in his works: grappling, wild bears, Austrian capital, the oldest profession.

This book starts in the fictional town of the Penacook area in the twentieth century's dawn, where the Winslow couple take in young ward the title character from St Cloud's home. We are a few generations before the storyline of His Earlier Novel, yet Dr Larch remains familiar: even then using the drug, beloved by his caregivers, opening every speech with “In this place...” But his role in Queen Esther is confined to these initial scenes.

The Winslows are concerned about parenting Esther correctly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “in what way could they help a young Jewish female find herself?” To tackle that, we jump ahead to Esther’s adulthood in the Roaring Twenties. She will be involved of the Jewish migration to the region, where she will enter the paramilitary group, the pro-Zionist paramilitary group whose “goal was to defend Jewish towns from hostile actions” and which would later establish the foundation of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Such are massive themes to take on, but having introduced them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s disappointing that Queen Esther is not really about St Cloud's and Wilbur Larch, it’s still more disappointing that it’s likewise not really concerning Esther. For reasons that must involve plot engineering, Esther ends up as a gestational carrier for another of the family's children, and delivers to a son, the boy, in the early forties – and the lion's share of this novel is the boy's story.

And at this point is where Irving’s preoccupations come roaring back, both regular and specific. Jimmy goes to – naturally – the city; there’s mention of evading the military conscription through bodily injury (His Earlier Book); a dog with a significant name (the animal, recall the earlier dog from His Hotel Novel); as well as the sport, prostitutes, writers and genitalia (Irving’s recurring).

Jimmy is a duller persona than Esther promised to be, and the secondary characters, such as students the two students, and Jimmy’s instructor Annelies Eissler, are one-dimensional also. There are several amusing episodes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a fight where a couple of ruffians get beaten with a walking aid and a air pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not ever been a delicate author, but that is not the difficulty. He has repeatedly repeated his points, hinted at narrative turns and enabled them to build up in the reader’s mind before leading them to completion in long, jarring, funny moments. For case, in Irving’s works, anatomical features tend to disappear: remember the speech organ in Garp, the digit in His Owen Book. Those losses resonate through the plot. In this novel, a central person loses an upper extremity – but we merely discover thirty pages the conclusion.

She comes back toward the end in the book, but merely with a last-minute feeling of concluding. We never learn the entire account of her experiences in the region. Queen Esther is a failure from a writer who previously gave such pleasure. That’s the downside. The good news is that The Cider House Rules – upon rereading alongside this novel – yet holds up wonderfully, 40 years on. So choose that instead: it’s twice as long as this book, but a dozen times as good.