🔗 Share this article

If certain novelists experience an peak phase, in which they reach the heights time after time, then American novelist John Irving’s ran through a run of several long, gratifying works, from his late-seventies breakthrough Garp to the 1989 release Owen Meany. These were generous, funny, big-hearted works, connecting characters he calls “outliers” to societal topics from women's rights to termination.

After Owen Meany, it’s been waning returns, aside from in size. His previous work, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was nine hundred pages long of themes Irving had examined more effectively in previous works (inability to speak, dwarfism, transgenderism), with a 200-page script in the center to fill it out – as if extra material were necessary.

So we come to a new Irving with caution but still a faint flame of optimism, which glows stronger when we find out that His Queen Esther Novel – a only four hundred thirty-two pages in length – “returns to the universe of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties work is one of Irving’s very best works, located mostly in an orphanage in the town of St Cloud’s, managed by Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Homer Wells.

This novel is a disappointment from a writer who previously gave such joy

In Cider House, Irving wrote about pregnancy termination and identity with colour, humor and an comprehensive understanding. And it was a important work because it left behind the topics that were turning into repetitive habits in his works: grappling, wild bears, Austrian capital, the oldest profession.

The novel starts in the imaginary community of Penacook, New Hampshire in the twentieth century's dawn, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow welcome young orphan the title character from St Cloud's home. We are a several decades before the events of His Earlier Novel, yet Wilbur Larch stays identifiable: still addicted to the drug, beloved by his nurses, beginning every speech with “At St Cloud's...” But his role in the book is limited to these early parts.

The Winslows are concerned about bringing up Esther correctly: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how might they help a adolescent girl of Jewish descent discover her identity?” To answer that, we jump ahead to Esther’s adulthood in the twenties era. She will be involved of the Jewish exodus to the region, where she will enter the paramilitary group, the pro-Zionist militant organisation whose “goal was to defend Jewish settlements from opposition” and which would eventually become the foundation of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Such are enormous topics to tackle, but having presented them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s regrettable that the novel is not really about the orphanage and Wilbur Larch, it’s all the more upsetting that it’s additionally not about Esther. For reasons that must involve story mechanics, Esther turns into a surrogate mother for one more of the family's offspring, and delivers to a male child, the boy, in the early forties – and the majority of this book is Jimmy’s narrative.

And now is where Irving’s fixations return strongly, both typical and specific. Jimmy goes to – naturally – the Austrian capital; there’s discussion of avoiding the draft notice through self-harm (Owen Meany); a canine with a symbolic designation (the animal, meet Sorrow from His Hotel Novel); as well as wrestling, prostitutes, authors and penises (Irving’s passim).

He is a duller figure than the heroine promised to be, and the secondary players, such as young people Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s instructor Eissler, are one-dimensional also. There are several amusing scenes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a fight where a handful of ruffians get assaulted with a support and a tire pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has never been a nuanced novelist, but that is is not the issue. He has consistently repeated his points, telegraphed narrative turns and enabled them to accumulate in the viewer's imagination before taking them to completion in long, jarring, funny moments. For example, in Irving’s works, body parts tend to go missing: remember the tongue in The Garp Novel, the finger in Owen Meany. Those losses resonate through the story. In the book, a central character suffers the loss of an arm – but we merely discover thirty pages later the conclusion.

Esther comes back late in the story, but merely with a last-minute impression of wrapping things up. We not once do find out the entire account of her time in the region. This novel is a disappointment from a writer who in the past gave such pleasure. That’s the bad news. The upside is that Cider House – I reread it in parallel to this book – yet holds up excellently, four decades later. So pick up the earlier work instead: it’s double the length as Queen Esther, but far as great.