🔗 Share this article

If certain novelists have an imperial era, during which they achieve the summit consistently, then American author John Irving’s lasted through a run of four substantial, rewarding works, from his 1978 hit His Garp Novel to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. These were rich, humorous, compassionate novels, linking protagonists he calls “misfits” to social issues from feminism to termination.

After His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been diminishing returns, aside from in page length. His last work, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was nine hundred pages in length of themes Irving had delved into better in prior works (mutism, short stature, trans issues), with a 200-page film script in the middle to extend it – as if padding were needed.

Therefore we come to a new Irving with caution but still a tiny spark of optimism, which glows brighter when we learn that His Queen Esther Novel – a mere 432 pages – “returns to the world of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties work is one of Irving’s very best books, located largely in an children's home in the town of St Cloud’s, operated by Dr Larch and his apprentice Homer Wells.

This novel is a letdown from a author who previously gave such delight

In His Cider House Novel, Irving wrote about termination and acceptance with vibrancy, comedy and an all-encompassing compassion. And it was a significant book because it left behind the topics that were evolving into repetitive habits in his novels: grappling, wild bears, Vienna, the oldest profession.

Queen Esther starts in the imaginary village of Penacook, New Hampshire in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow adopt young foundling Esther from the orphanage. We are a few generations before the storyline of Cider House, yet Wilbur Larch stays identifiable: already dependent on ether, adored by his nurses, beginning every talk with “At St Cloud's...” But his appearance in this novel is restricted to these early parts.

The couple are concerned about parenting Esther well: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how could they help a adolescent Jewish girl understand her place?” To address that, we jump ahead to Esther’s adulthood in the 1920s. She will be part of the Jewish exodus to Palestine, where she will join the paramilitary group, the pro-Zionist armed organisation whose “goal was to safeguard Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would subsequently become the basis of the Israel's military.

Those are huge subjects to take on, but having introduced them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s frustrating that Queen Esther is hardly about St Cloud’s and the doctor, it’s all the more upsetting that it’s likewise not about Esther. For reasons that must involve plot engineering, Esther turns into a surrogate mother for a different of the couple's daughters, and delivers to a baby boy, Jimmy, in 1941 – and the majority of this book is Jimmy’s story.

And now is where Irving’s fixations reappear loudly, both typical and distinct. Jimmy relocates to – naturally – Vienna; there’s discussion of dodging the draft notice through self-harm (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a dog with a significant title (the animal, recall the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, streetwalkers, novelists and penises (Irving’s throughout).

The character is a more mundane character than the heroine hinted to be, and the minor figures, such as students Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s tutor Annelies Eissler, are flat also. There are some amusing episodes – Jimmy losing his virginity; a brawl where a few ruffians get assaulted with a walking aid and a air pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not once been a subtle author, but that is isn't the issue. He has repeatedly reiterated his points, hinted at plot developments and allowed them to accumulate in the audience's imagination before taking them to fruition in long, jarring, amusing scenes. For case, in Irving’s books, body parts tend to disappear: think of the speech organ in Garp, the finger in Owen Meany. Those absences reverberate through the plot. In Queen Esther, a key person loses an arm – but we only find out thirty pages the conclusion.

Esther returns toward the end in the story, but merely with a eleventh-hour feeling of concluding. We not once do find out the complete narrative of her experiences in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a failure from a novelist who once gave such delight. That’s the downside. The positive note is that His Classic Novel – I reread it alongside this work – still stands up beautifully, after forty years. So read the earlier work instead: it’s much longer as Queen Esther, but 12 times as great.