🔗 Share this article

If some authors have an peak phase, in which they hit the heights consistently, then U.S. writer John Irving’s lasted through a sequence of several long, satisfying novels, from his late-seventies success His Garp Novel to the 1989 release His Owen Meany Book. These were expansive, witty, compassionate books, connecting protagonists he describes as “misfits” to cultural themes from gender equality to abortion.

Following Owen Meany, it’s been waning results, except in page length. His last novel, 2022’s The Chairlift Book, was 900 pages long of topics Irving had delved into more skillfully in prior novels (inability to speak, dwarfism, gender identity), with a two-hundred-page script in the middle to pad it out – as if filler were needed.

So we come to a new Irving with reservation but still a faint flame of optimism, which burns stronger when we discover that Queen Esther – a just four hundred thirty-two pages – “goes back to the world of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties work is one of Irving’s finest works, set largely in an orphanage in Maine's St Cloud’s, run by Wilbur Larch and his protege Homer.

This novel is a failure from a author who once gave such joy

In Cider House, Irving wrote about termination and belonging with vibrancy, comedy and an total empathy. And it was a significant book because it moved past the themes that were becoming annoying tics in his novels: wrestling, ursine creatures, Vienna, prostitution.

Queen Esther starts in the made-up community of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow welcome teenage orphan Esther from St Cloud’s. We are a several decades before the storyline of The Cider House Rules, yet Dr Larch is still familiar: already using anesthetic, respected by his caregivers, opening every talk with “In this place...” But his presence in the book is limited to these opening scenes.

The family worry about raising Esther correctly: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how could they help a teenage girl of Jewish descent discover her identity?” To answer that, we flash forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the 1920s. She will be involved of the Jewish exodus to Palestine, where she will join the paramilitary group, the Jewish nationalist militant force whose “mission was to safeguard Jewish settlements from hostile actions” and which would eventually establish the basis of the Israel's military.

Such are massive subjects to address, but having introduced them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s frustrating that the novel is not really about St Cloud’s and the doctor, it’s all the more upsetting that it’s also not about the titular figure. For causes that must involve narrative construction, Esther ends up as a surrogate mother for one more of the couple's daughters, and bears to a baby boy, Jimmy, in 1941 – and the lion's share of this book is the boy's narrative.

And at this point is where Irving’s preoccupations return strongly, both common and particular. Jimmy moves to – naturally – the Austrian capital; there’s discussion of dodging the Vietnam draft through self-mutilation (His Earlier Book); a dog with a symbolic name (Hard Rain, recall the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, sex workers, novelists and genitalia (Irving’s throughout).

Jimmy is a more mundane figure than the female lead promised to be, and the secondary characters, such as young people Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s tutor the tutor, are one-dimensional also. There are some amusing set pieces – Jimmy losing his virginity; a brawl where a handful of ruffians get beaten with a crutch and a bicycle pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has never been a nuanced writer, but that is isn't the difficulty. He has repeatedly restated his arguments, telegraphed plot developments and let them to accumulate in the audience's thoughts before bringing them to completion in lengthy, shocking, amusing moments. For instance, in Irving’s books, body parts tend to disappear: think of the tongue in Garp, the digit in His Owen Book. Those absences reverberate through the narrative. In the book, a major character suffers the loss of an arm – but we just discover thirty pages later the conclusion.

Esther reappears in the final part in the story, but only with a final feeling of ending the story. We never do find out the full account of her experiences in the region. This novel is a failure from a writer who previously gave such joy. That’s the negative aspect. The upside is that His Classic Novel – I reread it alongside this work – still holds up beautifully, after forty years. So read that as an alternative: it’s much longer as the new novel, but 12 times as great.