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If some writers have an golden phase, during which they hit the heights consistently, then U.S. author John Irving’s extended through a series of several long, gratifying novels, from his 1978 success Garp to the 1989 release Owen Meany. Such were rich, humorous, compassionate works, tying protagonists he refers to as “outsiders” to cultural themes from gender equality to termination.

Following A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing returns, except in word count. His last book, 2022’s The Chairlift Book, was nine hundred pages of topics Irving had delved into better in prior books (inability to speak, restricted growth, transgenderism), with a 200-page script in the center to pad it out – as if extra material were necessary.

Therefore we come to a recent Irving with care but still a tiny spark of expectation, which burns hotter when we learn that Queen Esther – a just four hundred thirty-two pages in length – “returns to the setting of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties novel is among Irving’s top-tier novels, located mostly in an institution in the town of St Cloud’s, managed by Dr Larch and his assistant Homer.

Queen Esther is a disappointment from a novelist who once gave such pleasure

In The Cider House Rules, Irving wrote about pregnancy termination and belonging with colour, wit and an all-encompassing understanding. And it was a important novel because it abandoned the subjects that were becoming repetitive habits in his books: grappling, ursine creatures, Austrian capital, sex work.

The novel opens in the made-up village of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where Thomas and Constance Winslow welcome 14-year-old foundling the protagonist from the orphanage. We are a several decades before the storyline of Cider House, yet the doctor remains recognisable: already addicted to the drug, adored by his staff, opening every speech with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his appearance in the book is confined to these opening sections.

The couple worry about parenting Esther well: she’s of Jewish faith, and “in what way could they help a teenage Jewish girl understand her place?” To address that, we move forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the Roaring Twenties. She will be part of the Jewish migration to the area, where she will become part of Haganah, the Zionist militant organisation whose “goal was to protect Jewish settlements from opposition” and which would later become the basis of the Israeli Defense Forces.

These are enormous subjects to take on, but having brought in them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s regrettable that this book is hardly about St Cloud’s and Dr Larch, it’s all the more disappointing that it’s additionally not about Esther. For causes that must relate to story mechanics, Esther turns into a substitute parent for one more of the Winslows’ offspring, and delivers to a son, the boy, in the early forties – and the lion's share of this novel is the boy's tale.

And here is where Irving’s obsessions return strongly, both typical and distinct. Jimmy goes to – of course – the Austrian capital; there’s mention of evading the military conscription through self-mutilation (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a pet with a symbolic name (Hard Rain, remember Sorrow from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as grappling, sex workers, writers and penises (Irving’s recurring).

Jimmy is a less interesting character than Esther hinted to be, and the secondary characters, such as students Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s teacher Annelies Eissler, are underdeveloped also. There are several nice episodes – Jimmy losing his virginity; a brawl where a couple of bullies get beaten with a walking aid and a air pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has never been a nuanced writer, but that is not the issue. He has always restated his arguments, foreshadowed plot developments and let them to build up in the reader’s mind before taking them to completion in long, shocking, funny moments. For example, in Irving’s books, body parts tend to go missing: think of the speech organ in Garp, the finger in His Owen Book. Those absences reverberate through the plot. In this novel, a key figure suffers the loss of an upper extremity – but we merely find out thirty pages before the finish.

Esther reappears late in the story, but only with a last-minute impression of concluding. We do not learn the full story of her time in the region. Queen Esther is a letdown from a writer who previously gave such joy. That’s the bad news. The positive note is that Cider House – I reread it alongside this work – even now stands up wonderfully, four decades later. So pick up it as an alternative: it’s double the length as the new novel, but a dozen times as great.