🔗 Share this article

If a few novelists experience an imperial era, in which they achieve the heights repeatedly, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s extended through a series of several long, gratifying books, from his late-seventies success His Garp Novel to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. Such were expansive, humorous, big-hearted novels, tying figures he calls “outliers” to social issues from gender equality to abortion.

Since His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been waning outcomes, save in page length. His most recent book, 2022’s The Last Chairlift, was 900 pages in length of topics Irving had delved into better in earlier novels (selective mutism, restricted growth, gender identity), with a lengthy script in the middle to extend it – as if filler were needed.

Therefore we approach a latest Irving with caution but still a faint flame of expectation, which burns hotter when we learn that Queen Esther – a only 432 pages – “revisits the setting of The Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties book is part of Irving’s finest books, located primarily in an orphanage in the town of St Cloud’s, operated by Wilbur Larch and his assistant Wells.

The book is a disappointment from a author who in the past gave such joy

In The Cider House Rules, Irving discussed termination and identity with vibrancy, wit and an comprehensive understanding. And it was a important book because it abandoned the topics that were turning into annoying tics in his books: wrestling, ursine creatures, the city of Vienna, prostitution.

Queen Esther starts in the fictional town of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where the Winslow couple take in 14-year-old orphan Esther from the orphanage. We are a a number of decades before the storyline of Cider House, yet Dr Larch remains recognisable: even then using anesthetic, adored by his caregivers, starting every address with “In this place...” But his role in Queen Esther is limited to these early scenes.

The family worry about raising Esther properly: she’s Jewish, and “in what way could they help a teenage Jewish female understand her place?” To answer that, we flash forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the Roaring Twenties. She will be a member of the Jewish emigration to the area, where she will join Haganah, the Zionist militant organisation whose “mission was to safeguard Jewish towns from opposition” and which would eventually become the core of the IDF.

Such are massive subjects to address, but having presented them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s disappointing that the novel is hardly about St Cloud's and Wilbur Larch, it’s even more disappointing that it’s additionally not about the titular figure. For motivations that must connect to narrative construction, Esther turns into a gestational carrier for a different of the family's children, and gives birth to a son, Jimmy, in World War II era – and the bulk of this book is the boy's narrative.

And here is where Irving’s obsessions return strongly, both typical and particular. Jimmy moves to – naturally – the city; there’s discussion of evading the draft notice through self-harm (Owen Meany); a pet with a significant name (the dog's name, meet the canine from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as the sport, streetwalkers, authors and male anatomy (Irving’s recurring).

He is a more mundane figure than the female lead promised to be, and the secondary figures, such as students the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor Eissler, are flat too. There are a few enjoyable episodes – Jimmy losing his virginity; a brawl where a few ruffians get assaulted with a support and a tire pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not once been a delicate novelist, but that is isn't the issue. He has consistently restated his ideas, hinted at plot developments and let them to gather in the audience's mind before bringing them to resolution in long, jarring, amusing sequences. For case, in Irving’s novels, anatomical features tend to disappear: think of the speech organ in Garp, the hand part in His Owen Book. Those losses reverberate through the plot. In the book, a key figure suffers the loss of an limb – but we merely discover thirty pages the conclusion.

The protagonist comes back in the final part in the book, but just with a final sense of wrapping things up. We not once discover the full story of her experiences in Palestine and Israel. This novel is a disappointment from a writer who previously gave such pleasure. That’s the bad news. The positive note is that Cider House – upon rereading in parallel to this work – even now stands up wonderfully, four decades later. So pick up it in its place: it’s twice as long as the new novel, but 12 times as great.