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If a few writers have an peak phase, where they reach the summit repeatedly, then U.S. author John Irving’s extended through a sequence of four fat, gratifying books, from his late-seventies hit The World According to Garp to the 1989 release His Owen Meany Book. These were generous, funny, compassionate books, tying figures he calls “outliers” to social issues from feminism to abortion.

Since His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been diminishing returns, aside from in page length. His previous novel, 2022’s His Last Chairlift Novel, was 900 pages of themes Irving had explored more skillfully in prior books (mutism, dwarfism, gender identity), with a lengthy film script in the middle to fill it out – as if extra material were required.

Thus we come to a new Irving with caution but still a faint spark of expectation, which shines brighter when we discover that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages – “revisits the universe of The Cider House Rules”. That 1985 book is one of Irving’s finest novels, taking place largely in an children's home in St Cloud’s, Maine, operated by Dr Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer Wells.

This novel is a letdown from a writer who once gave such delight

In Cider House, Irving discussed abortion and identity with richness, comedy and an all-encompassing compassion. And it was a major novel because it abandoned the topics that were evolving into repetitive tics in his novels: grappling, wild bears, Austrian capital, sex work.

Queen Esther opens in the made-up community of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow take in teenage foundling the protagonist from St Cloud's home. We are a a number of years ahead of the storyline of Cider House, yet the doctor remains identifiable: already using ether, beloved by his nurses, beginning every talk with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his appearance in this novel is restricted to these initial scenes.

The couple worry about bringing up Esther well: she’s Jewish, and “how might they help a young girl of Jewish descent understand her place?” To tackle that, we move forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the 1920s. She will be a member of the Jewish migration to the region, where she will join the paramilitary group, the Zionist paramilitary organisation whose “mission was to protect Jewish settlements from Arab attacks” and which would subsequently form the foundation of the IDF.

These are massive themes to take on, but having introduced them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s frustrating that the novel is hardly about the orphanage and Wilbur Larch, it’s still more upsetting that it’s likewise not really concerning the titular figure. For reasons that must involve narrative construction, Esther becomes a gestational carrier for another of the Winslows’ children, and delivers to a baby boy, Jimmy, in World War II era – and the lion's share of this story is Jimmy’s tale.

And at this point is where Irving’s preoccupations reappear loudly, both common and specific. Jimmy relocates to – where else? – the city; there’s discussion of evading the Vietnam draft through self-harm (His Earlier Book); a pet with a symbolic title (the animal, recall the earlier dog from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, streetwalkers, writers and penises (Irving’s throughout).

The character is a more mundane figure than the heroine hinted to be, and the secondary characters, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor the tutor, are one-dimensional too. There are several enjoyable episodes – Jimmy deflowering; a confrontation where a couple of thugs get assaulted with a support and a bicycle pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not once been a subtle author, but that is not the issue. He has repeatedly reiterated his points, foreshadowed plot developments and let them to accumulate in the audience's imagination before leading them to resolution in extended, surprising, funny sequences. For case, in Irving’s novels, anatomical features tend to be lost: think of the speech organ in Garp, the digit in Owen Meany. Those missing pieces reverberate through the plot. In this novel, a key person loses an upper extremity – but we merely discover 30 pages before the end.

She returns late in the novel, but only with a last-minute feeling of wrapping things up. We do not learn the complete narrative of her experiences in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a letdown from a author who previously gave such delight. That’s the negative aspect. The positive note is that Cider House – upon rereading in parallel to this book – yet holds up wonderfully, after forty years. So read it as an alternative: it’s double the length as the new novel, but a dozen times as good.