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If a few novelists experience an golden period, in which they reach the summit time after time, then American novelist John Irving’s lasted through a sequence of several substantial, gratifying works, from his late-seventies breakthrough Garp to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were generous, humorous, compassionate novels, tying characters he refers to as “misfits” to cultural themes from gender equality to termination.

After His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been declining returns, save in size. His most recent novel, the 2022 release The Chairlift Book, was nine hundred pages in length of subjects Irving had explored more effectively in prior works (inability to speak, short stature, gender identity), with a lengthy screenplay in the middle to fill it out – as if extra material were necessary.

So we come to a new Irving with reservation but still a tiny flame of optimism, which shines hotter when we discover that His Queen Esther Novel – a mere 432 pages in length – “revisits the world of The Cider House Novel”. That 1985 work is part of Irving’s very best works, taking place largely in an institution in the town of St Cloud’s, run by Dr Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer Wells.

Queen Esther is a failure from a writer who previously gave such delight

In The Cider House Rules, Irving explored termination and identity with richness, humor and an comprehensive empathy. And it was a significant book because it moved past the themes that were evolving into tiresome habits in his books: grappling, bears, Vienna, sex work.

This book begins in the imaginary community of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where the Winslow couple welcome young ward the protagonist from St Cloud’s. We are a few years prior to the action of Cider House, yet Wilbur Larch remains familiar: still addicted to anesthetic, beloved by his nurses, beginning every address with “In this place...” But his appearance in Queen Esther is confined to these opening sections.

The family fret about raising Esther well: she’s Jewish, and “how might they help a teenage Jewish girl understand her place?” To tackle that, we flash forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the twenties era. She will be part of the Jewish migration to the area, where she will join Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary organisation whose “mission was to safeguard Jewish towns from opposition” and which would later establish the core of the IDF.

These are huge subjects to tackle, but having introduced them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s disappointing that Queen Esther is hardly about St Cloud’s and Dr Larch, it’s still more disappointing that it’s also not really concerning the main character. For causes that must relate to plot engineering, Esther turns into a substitute parent for a different of the couple's children, and bears to a son, the boy, in the early forties – and the bulk of this novel is the boy's tale.

And at this point is where Irving’s obsessions reappear loudly, both common and distinct. Jimmy goes to – naturally – the Austrian capital; there’s discussion of avoiding the draft notice through bodily injury (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a dog with a symbolic name (the dog's name, remember the canine from His Hotel Novel); as well as wrestling, prostitutes, novelists and penises (Irving’s recurring).

He is a duller figure than the heroine suggested to be, and the supporting players, such as young people the pair, and Jimmy’s tutor Annelies Eissler, are flat too. There are several amusing set pieces – Jimmy losing his virginity; a fight where a few thugs get assaulted with a crutch and a air pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has not ever been a subtle novelist, but that is isn't the difficulty. He has always restated his ideas, hinted at plot developments and enabled them to build up in the audience's thoughts before bringing them to completion in long, surprising, entertaining sequences. For case, in Irving’s books, anatomical features tend to disappear: remember the oral part in Garp, the digit in Owen Meany. Those absences echo through the narrative. In Queen Esther, a central person is deprived of an arm – but we merely find out thirty pages before the finish.

Esther reappears in the final part in the novel, but merely with a eleventh-hour sense of concluding. We never learn the full story of her time in the region. Queen Esther is a failure from a writer who in the past gave such joy. That’s the negative aspect. The good news is that The Cider House Rules – upon rereading alongside this novel – yet remains beautifully, four decades later. So pick up that instead: it’s double the length as the new novel, but far as good.