🔗 Share this article

If a few authors experience an peak period, in which they achieve the pinnacle consistently, then U.S. author John Irving’s ran through a run of several substantial, gratifying books, from his late-seventies breakthrough Garp to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were rich, humorous, big-hearted books, tying protagonists he refers to as “misfits” to cultural themes from feminism to abortion.

Since A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing returns, aside from in size. His most recent novel, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was nine hundred pages long of topics Irving had examined better in prior books (mutism, short stature, trans issues), with a 200-page film script in the middle to fill it out – as if padding were needed.

Thus we look at a latest Irving with care but still a small flame of hope, which glows stronger when we learn that Queen Esther – a only four hundred thirty-two pages – “returns to the setting of The Cider House Rules”. That 1985 book is one of Irving’s very best works, taking place largely in an institution in Maine's St Cloud’s, run by Dr Wilbur Larch and his protege Wells.

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

In His Cider House Novel, Irving wrote about pregnancy termination and belonging with richness, humor and an all-encompassing empathy. And it was a significant book because it abandoned the themes that were turning into tiresome tics in his books: grappling, wild bears, the city of Vienna, the oldest profession.

This book begins in the made-up village of New Hampshire's Penacook in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow welcome teenage ward the protagonist from the orphanage. We are a few years before the storyline of The Cider House Rules, yet Dr Larch is still familiar: still using anesthetic, respected by his caregivers, opening every speech with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his appearance in this novel is limited to these initial parts.

The Winslows worry about raising Esther correctly: she’s from a Jewish background, and “in what way could they help a teenage Jewish girl understand her place?” To tackle that, we flash forward to Esther’s adulthood in the twenties era. She will be a member of the Jewish migration to the region, where she will enter Haganah, the pro-Zionist armed group whose “goal was to protect Jewish communities from Arab attacks” and which would eventually become the core of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Those are enormous topics to tackle, but having introduced them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s regrettable that Queen Esther is not really about St Cloud’s and Dr Larch, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s also not really concerning the titular figure. For causes that must connect to narrative construction, Esther ends up as a gestational carrier for one more of the Winslows’ children, and gives birth to a baby boy, Jimmy, in the early forties – and the bulk of this novel is the boy's story.

And now is where Irving’s preoccupations return strongly, both regular and particular. Jimmy moves to – where else? – Vienna; there’s discussion of evading the Vietnam draft through self-mutilation (His Earlier Book); a pet with a significant designation (the dog's name, remember Sorrow from His Hotel Novel); as well as wrestling, prostitutes, authors and genitalia (Irving’s passim).

He is a more mundane persona than the female lead hinted to be, and the supporting characters, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor Eissler, are flat as well. There are a few nice set pieces – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a brawl where a couple of bullies get battered with a crutch and a air pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has never been a delicate author, but that is is not the issue. He has consistently restated his ideas, hinted at plot developments and allowed them to accumulate in the viewer's imagination before leading them to resolution in lengthy, jarring, amusing scenes. For instance, in Irving’s novels, body parts tend to go missing: think of the speech organ in The Garp Novel, the digit in His Owen Book. Those losses resonate through the plot. In this novel, a major person is deprived of an arm – but we only learn thirty pages the conclusion.

The protagonist reappears in the final part in the novel, but only with a eleventh-hour feeling of ending the story. We not once learn the full account of her life in the Middle East. This novel is a disappointment from a novelist who once gave such delight. That’s the negative aspect. The positive note is that The Cider House Rules – revisiting it in parallel to this book – even now stands up wonderfully, 40 years on. So pick up that in its place: it’s twice as long as Queen Esther, but far as great.