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If a few writers have an peak phase, during which they hit the heights repeatedly, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s extended through a series of four long, satisfying novels, from his late-seventies breakthrough Garp to the 1989 release Owen Meany. Those were expansive, humorous, compassionate works, linking figures he refers to as “misfits” to social issues from women's rights to reproductive rights.

Since Owen Meany, it’s been declining outcomes, aside from in size. His last book, 2022’s The Last Chairlift, was 900 pages in length of topics Irving had examined better in earlier novels (mutism, restricted growth, trans issues), with a two-hundred-page film script in the center to extend it – as if filler were required.

Thus we come to a new Irving with caution but still a small flame of expectation, which burns brighter when we discover that His Queen Esther Novel – a mere four hundred thirty-two pages long – “goes back to the setting of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties novel is among Irving’s top-tier novels, taking place mostly in an orphanage in St Cloud’s, Maine, run by Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Homer.

The book is a failure from a novelist who once gave such joy

In Cider House, Irving explored pregnancy termination and acceptance with vibrancy, wit and an comprehensive empathy. And it was a major work because it left behind the themes that were turning into tiresome habits in his books: grappling, ursine creatures, Vienna, sex work.

Queen Esther begins in the imaginary community of New Hampshire's Penacook in the beginning of the 1900s, where Thomas and Constance Winslow take in 14-year-old orphan the protagonist from St Cloud's home. We are a few decades before the storyline of His Earlier Novel, yet the doctor stays recognisable: still dependent on ether, adored by his caregivers, beginning every address with “In this place...” But his presence in the book is confined to these opening sections.

The family fret about raising Esther well: she’s Jewish, and “how might they help a adolescent girl of Jewish descent find herself?” To address that, we flash forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the 1920s. She will be a member of the Jewish exodus to the region, where she will enter Haganah, the pro-Zionist paramilitary force whose “mission was to safeguard Jewish communities from opposition” and which would later become the core of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Those are enormous subjects to tackle, but having introduced them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s disappointing that Queen Esther is not really about the orphanage and Dr Larch, it’s still more disappointing that it’s also not really concerning the titular figure. For motivations that must relate to plot engineering, Esther turns into a gestational carrier for another of the Winslows’ daughters, and delivers to a son, the boy, in the early forties – and the lion's share of this book is his story.

And now is where Irving’s fixations return strongly, both regular and specific. Jimmy relocates to – naturally – the city; there’s mention of avoiding the draft notice through bodily injury (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a canine with a symbolic title (Hard Rain, remember the earlier dog from His Hotel Novel); as well as grappling, streetwalkers, writers and male anatomy (Irving’s passim).

The character is a duller persona than Esther promised to be, and the minor players, such as pupils Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s teacher the tutor, are flat too. There are several enjoyable episodes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a fight where a handful of ruffians get assaulted with a crutch and a tire pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has not once been a subtle author, but that is is not the problem. He has repeatedly repeated his arguments, foreshadowed narrative turns and enabled them to accumulate in the viewer's imagination before bringing them to completion in long, shocking, funny sequences. For case, in Irving’s books, physical elements tend to go missing: recall the speech organ in Garp, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those losses reverberate through the narrative. In the book, a major person is deprived of an limb – but we merely find out 30 pages the finish.

She returns late in the story, but merely with a eleventh-hour feeling of ending the story. We not once discover the full account of her experiences in the Middle East. Queen Esther is a disappointment from a writer who once gave such pleasure. That’s the bad news. The upside is that The Cider House Rules – upon rereading in parallel to this novel – even now stands up wonderfully, after forty years. So read that as an alternative: it’s much longer as Queen Esther, but far as good.