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If certain novelists have an peak phase, where they achieve the pinnacle consistently, then American novelist John Irving’s extended through a run of several substantial, satisfying novels, from his late-seventies hit The World According to Garp to 1989’s His Owen Meany Book. Such were generous, witty, compassionate works, linking protagonists he describes as “outsiders” to cultural themes from women's rights to abortion.

Since His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been waning outcomes, aside from in page length. His most recent novel, 2022’s The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages in length of subjects Irving had examined more effectively in earlier novels (inability to speak, dwarfism, gender identity), with a two-hundred-page script in the middle to extend it – as if extra material were necessary.

So we come to a new Irving with care but still a small spark of expectation, which burns brighter when we discover that His Queen Esther Novel – a just four hundred thirty-two pages in length – “revisits the setting of The Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties work is one of Irving’s top-tier books, located primarily in an children's home in St Cloud’s, Maine, operated by Dr Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer Wells.

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

In The Cider House Rules, Irving discussed pregnancy termination and identity with vibrancy, comedy and an all-encompassing compassion. And it was a important work because it left behind the topics that were becoming annoying tics in his novels: grappling, bears, Austrian capital, the oldest profession.

The novel begins in the imaginary village of New Hampshire's Penacook in the early 20th century, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow take in young ward Esther from St Cloud’s. We are a few years prior to the events of His Earlier Novel, yet the doctor remains identifiable: even then addicted to the drug, beloved by his nurses, opening every speech with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his role in Queen Esther is limited to these initial parts.

The family worry about bringing up Esther correctly: she’s Jewish, and “how might they help a adolescent Jewish girl find herself?” To address that, we flash forward to Esther’s later life in the 1920s. She will be involved of the Jewish migration to the area, where she will enter the Haganah, the pro-Zionist militant group whose “goal was to protect Jewish towns from hostile actions” and which would later become the foundation of the Israel's military.

Such are massive subjects to tackle, but having introduced them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s regrettable that this book is not really about St Cloud's and Wilbur Larch, it’s still more disheartening that it’s additionally not focused on the main character. For motivations that must relate to plot engineering, Esther turns into a surrogate mother for one more of the couple's offspring, and delivers to a son, James, in the early forties – and the lion's share of this novel is the boy's story.

And here is where Irving’s obsessions come roaring back, both regular and particular. Jimmy relocates to – naturally – the city; there’s talk of avoiding the military conscription through bodily injury (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a dog with a significant name (Hard Rain, recall the canine from His Hotel Novel); as well as the sport, prostitutes, authors and genitalia (Irving’s throughout).

He is a more mundane figure than Esther hinted to be, and the secondary characters, such as young people Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s instructor Eissler, are flat too. There are some nice episodes – Jimmy deflowering; a confrontation where a few bullies get assaulted with a crutch and a air pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has never been a nuanced novelist, but that is not the issue. He has always repeated his arguments, foreshadowed narrative turns and allowed them to accumulate in the audience's thoughts before bringing them to fruition in lengthy, shocking, amusing sequences. For case, in Irving’s novels, anatomical features tend to disappear: remember the speech organ in Garp, the digit in Owen Meany. Those losses reverberate through the story. In Queen Esther, a central figure loses an limb – but we just discover thirty pages later the conclusion.

The protagonist reappears toward the end in the book, but merely with a final impression of ending the story. We never discover the full story of her life in Palestine and Israel. This novel is a failure from a writer who in the past gave such delight. That’s the negative aspect. The upside is that The Cider House Rules – revisiting it alongside this book – even now remains beautifully, four decades later. So read it instead: it’s much longer as the new novel, but 12 times as great.