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If certain authors experience an imperial period, where they hit the heights time after time, then American author John Irving’s lasted through a run of several fat, satisfying books, from his late-seventies success Garp to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were generous, witty, big-hearted books, linking figures he describes as “outsiders” to cultural themes from feminism to abortion.

Since A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been waning outcomes, except in word count. His last book, the 2022 release The Chairlift Book, was nine hundred pages long of subjects Irving had explored more skillfully in previous works (mutism, restricted growth, transgenderism), with a 200-page film script in the heart to fill it out – as if extra material were needed.

So we look at a recent Irving with caution but still a faint glimmer of hope, which burns hotter when we find out that Queen Esther – a only 432 pages in length – “revisits the world of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties book is one of Irving’s top-tier books, taking place mostly in an orphanage in Maine's St Cloud’s, operated by Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Homer Wells.

This novel is a letdown from a writer who once gave such delight

In The Cider House Rules, Irving discussed termination and identity with colour, wit and an all-encompassing understanding. And it was a major work because it abandoned the subjects that were becoming repetitive habits in his works: grappling, ursine creatures, Vienna, prostitution.

This book starts in the imaginary community of Penacook, New Hampshire in the twentieth century's dawn, where Thomas and Constance Winslow take in young orphan Esther from the orphanage. We are a a number of years prior to the storyline of The Cider House Rules, yet Wilbur Larch stays familiar: even then using anesthetic, beloved by his nurses, starting every address with “In this place...” But his role in the book is restricted to these early parts.

The family are concerned about raising Esther properly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how could they help a teenage Jewish girl understand her place?” To answer that, we flash forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the 1920s. She will be a member of the Jewish emigration to the region, where she will join Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary organisation whose “goal was to protect Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would later form the basis of the Israel's military.

These are huge themes to address, but having introduced them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s frustrating that Queen Esther is not really about St Cloud’s and Wilbur Larch, it’s still more disappointing that it’s also not focused on the titular figure. For motivations that must connect to narrative construction, Esther turns into a substitute parent for another of the family's children, and delivers to a son, the boy, in 1941 – and the lion's share of this story is Jimmy’s tale.

And now is where Irving’s obsessions reappear loudly, both common and distinct. Jimmy goes to – of course – the Austrian capital; there’s discussion of avoiding the draft notice through bodily injury (His Earlier Book); a pet with a significant name (the animal, remember Sorrow from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as the sport, prostitutes, novelists and penises (Irving’s passim).

The character is a more mundane character than the female lead suggested to be, and the supporting figures, such as young people the pair, and Jimmy’s instructor the tutor, are underdeveloped too. There are some nice set pieces – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a brawl where a couple of thugs get beaten with a crutch and a tire pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not once been a subtle novelist, but that is is not the difficulty. He has always restated his arguments, foreshadowed story twists and allowed them to gather in the viewer's imagination before bringing them to fruition in extended, shocking, funny scenes. For example, in Irving’s novels, body parts tend to disappear: remember the tongue in Garp, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those absences resonate through the plot. In Queen Esther, a central character suffers the loss of an upper extremity – but we merely discover thirty pages before the finish.

She returns late in the book, but merely with a eleventh-hour sense of concluding. We never learn the entire narrative of her life in Palestine and Israel. This novel is a letdown from a author who once gave such joy. That’s the downside. The upside is that Cider House – upon rereading together with this novel – yet holds up wonderfully, four decades later. So pick up the earlier work as an alternative: it’s much longer as Queen Esther, but 12 times as good.