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If a few novelists experience an imperial period, during which they hit the pinnacle consistently, then American writer John Irving’s ran through a run of four fat, rewarding books, from his late-seventies breakthrough His Garp Novel to the 1989 release Owen Meany. Such were rich, funny, compassionate works, linking protagonists he describes as “outliers” to societal topics from women's rights to abortion.

After His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been diminishing returns, except in page length. His previous novel, the 2022 release The Chairlift Book, was 900 pages in length of topics Irving had delved into more effectively in earlier works (inability to speak, short stature, transgenderism), with a 200-page screenplay in the heart to fill it out – as if extra material were needed.

Thus we come to a latest Irving with caution but still a small flame of expectation, which glows stronger when we discover that Queen Esther – a only four hundred thirty-two pages long – “revisits the universe of The Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties novel is among Irving’s finest works, taking place mostly in an children's home in St Cloud’s, Maine, managed by Dr Wilbur Larch and his protege Homer Wells.

Queen Esther is a letdown from a author who previously gave such pleasure

In His Cider House Novel, Irving explored abortion and belonging with colour, wit and an total empathy. And it was a significant work because it abandoned the themes that were evolving into repetitive habits in his novels: the sport of wrestling, wild bears, Austrian capital, prostitution.

The novel opens in the imaginary town of New Hampshire's Penacook in the beginning of the 1900s, where Thomas and Constance Winslow adopt 14-year-old foundling the protagonist from the orphanage. We are a a number of decades prior to the storyline of The Cider House Rules, yet Wilbur Larch remains recognisable: even then dependent on anesthetic, beloved by his staff, starting every speech with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his appearance in this novel is confined to these opening scenes.

The family are concerned about raising Esther well: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how could they help a teenage Jewish female find herself?” To answer that, we flash forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the 1920s. She will be involved of the Jewish emigration to the area, where she will join the Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary force whose “purpose was to protect Jewish settlements from Arab attacks” and which would eventually form the basis of the IDF.

These are enormous themes to address, but having presented them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s regrettable that this book is hardly about the orphanage and Dr Larch, it’s still more upsetting that it’s likewise not about the titular figure. For reasons that must involve narrative construction, Esther ends up as a surrogate mother for another of the couple's children, and gives birth to a baby boy, James, in World War II era – and the bulk of this story is Jimmy’s story.

And now is where Irving’s obsessions reappear loudly, both typical and specific. Jimmy moves to – naturally – the Austrian capital; there’s talk of avoiding the draft notice through self-harm (His Earlier Book); a pet with a significant title (Hard Rain, meet the earlier dog from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as the sport, sex workers, authors and male anatomy (Irving’s recurring).

The character is a duller figure than the female lead promised to be, and the minor figures, such as young people Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s tutor Eissler, are flat as well. There are some amusing scenes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a confrontation where a handful of ruffians get assaulted with a walking aid and a air pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has never been a subtle novelist, but that is is not the difficulty. He has consistently reiterated his ideas, hinted at story twists and let them to accumulate in the viewer's mind before taking them to resolution in long, shocking, amusing scenes. For example, in Irving’s novels, body parts tend to disappear: think of the oral part in Garp, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those losses echo through the narrative. In this novel, a central character suffers the loss of an upper extremity – but we merely discover thirty pages the finish.

The protagonist reappears toward the end in the book, but only with a final impression of concluding. We do not learn the entire story of her time in the region. The book is a failure from a author who once gave such pleasure. That’s the downside. The good news is that His Classic Novel – I reread it in parallel to this work – even now stands up beautifully, 40 years on. So choose the earlier work instead: it’s much longer as this book, but 12 times as enjoyable.