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If a few authors experience an peak phase, in which they hit the summit consistently, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s extended through a series of several substantial, rewarding books, from his late-seventies success The World According to Garp to the 1989 release Owen Meany. Those were generous, funny, big-hearted books, connecting figures he describes as “outsiders” to societal topics from feminism to termination.

Following A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been waning returns, save in page length. His most recent book, 2022’s The Chairlift Book, was 900 pages in length of themes Irving had examined more skillfully in previous works (selective mutism, restricted growth, trans issues), with a lengthy screenplay in the center to extend it – as if padding were necessary.

Therefore we approach a new Irving with caution but still a small glimmer of expectation, which shines brighter when we find out that His Queen Esther Novel – a just 432 pages – “goes back to the world of The Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties work is one of Irving’s top-tier works, set mostly in an institution in Maine's St Cloud’s, operated by Dr Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Homer Wells.

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

In His Cider House Novel, Irving wrote about termination and identity with vibrancy, comedy and an all-encompassing compassion. And it was a significant novel because it moved past the themes that were turning into repetitive tics in his novels: the sport of wrestling, bears, Vienna, sex work.

This book begins in the made-up town of Penacook, New Hampshire in the early 20th century, where the Winslow couple take in 14-year-old ward the title character from the orphanage. We are a few generations prior to the action of Cider House, yet Wilbur Larch is still familiar: still addicted to anesthetic, beloved by his nurses, beginning every speech with “At St Cloud's...” But his presence in this novel is restricted to these opening sections.

The couple worry about raising Esther properly: she’s Jewish, and “how might they help a adolescent Jewish female understand her place?” To tackle that, we flash forward to Esther’s adulthood in the 1920s. She will be involved of the Jewish exodus to Palestine, where she will become part of Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary group whose “purpose was to protect Jewish settlements from Arab attacks” and which would subsequently establish the basis of the Israel's military.

Those are huge subjects to address, but having introduced them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s disappointing that Queen Esther is not actually about St Cloud's and the doctor, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s additionally not focused on the titular figure. For motivations that must relate to plot engineering, Esther ends up as a gestational carrier for one more of the Winslows’ children, and gives birth to a baby boy, Jimmy, in the early forties – and the bulk of this book is his tale.

And here is where Irving’s obsessions reappear loudly, both common and specific. Jimmy relocates to – of course – the city; there’s talk of evading the draft notice through bodily injury (Owen Meany); a canine with a meaningful name (the dog's name, meet Sorrow from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as the sport, streetwalkers, novelists and male anatomy (Irving’s throughout).

The character is a less interesting persona than Esther hinted to be, and the secondary figures, such as pupils the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor Eissler, are one-dimensional also. There are several amusing episodes – Jimmy deflowering; a brawl where a couple of ruffians get battered with a support and a bicycle pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not once been a delicate writer, but that is isn't the difficulty. He has always repeated his points, foreshadowed plot developments and let them to gather in the viewer's mind before bringing them to resolution in extended, surprising, funny sequences. For example, in Irving’s books, physical elements tend to go missing: think of the speech organ in Garp, the finger in Owen Meany. Those absences echo through the story. In the book, a key person loses an limb – but we just learn 30 pages later the finish.

The protagonist returns toward the end in the story, but just with a final feeling of wrapping things up. We do not do find out the full account of her time in Palestine and Israel. The book is a letdown from a writer who previously gave such delight. That’s the negative aspect. The upside is that Cider House – upon rereading alongside this novel – even now holds up wonderfully, after forty years. So choose that instead: it’s twice as long as the new novel, but a dozen times as enjoyable.