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If a few authors experience an peak period, where they reach the heights consistently, then American novelist John Irving’s ran through a sequence of several substantial, rewarding books, from his late-seventies breakthrough The World According to Garp to the 1989 release His Owen Meany Book. Those were expansive, witty, compassionate novels, connecting protagonists he calls “outsiders” to societal topics from women's rights to termination.

Since A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been waning outcomes, except in size. His previous book, the 2022 release His Last Chairlift Novel, was nine hundred pages long of subjects Irving had examined more effectively in previous books (selective mutism, restricted growth, gender identity), with a two-hundred-page screenplay in the heart to pad it out – as if padding were needed.

Thus we look at a new Irving with caution but still a tiny glimmer of hope, which shines stronger when we find out that Queen Esther – a mere 432 pages long – “returns to the world of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties novel is among Irving’s finest novels, located primarily in an institution in Maine's St Cloud’s, managed by Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer.

Queen Esther is a letdown from a novelist who once gave such pleasure

In The Cider House Rules, Irving wrote about pregnancy termination and belonging with colour, humor and an comprehensive empathy. And it was a significant book because it abandoned the themes that were evolving into repetitive habits in his novels: grappling, bears, the city of Vienna, prostitution.

Queen Esther starts in the fictional village of Penacook, New Hampshire in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow take in young orphan the protagonist from St Cloud’s. We are a a number of decades prior to the events of The Cider House Rules, yet Dr Larch is still recognisable: already dependent on ether, beloved by his nurses, opening every speech with “At St Cloud's...” But his appearance in the book is limited to these initial scenes.

The Winslows are concerned about parenting Esther correctly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how could they help a young girl of Jewish descent find herself?” To tackle that, we jump ahead to Esther’s later life in the Roaring Twenties. She will be involved of the Jewish exodus to the area, where she will enter Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary force whose “mission was to defend Jewish towns from hostile actions” and which would later form the core of the IDF.

These are enormous themes to tackle, but having presented them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s frustrating that Queen Esther is not actually about St Cloud’s and Dr Larch, it’s still more disheartening that it’s likewise not focused on the titular figure. For causes that must relate to story mechanics, Esther ends up as a gestational carrier for one more of the family's children, and bears to a baby boy, Jimmy, in 1941 – and the bulk of this book is the boy's story.

And now is where Irving’s obsessions return strongly, both regular and particular. Jimmy goes to – naturally – the city; there’s talk of evading the Vietnam draft through bodily injury (His Earlier Book); a pet with a meaningful title (the dog's name, remember the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as the sport, sex workers, authors and genitalia (Irving’s throughout).

Jimmy is a less interesting character than Esther suggested to be, and the secondary characters, such as pupils the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor Eissler, are one-dimensional as well. There are a few amusing set pieces – Jimmy losing his virginity; a brawl where a handful of bullies get assaulted with a support and a tire pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has never been a subtle novelist, but that is is not the difficulty. He has always repeated his arguments, telegraphed narrative turns and enabled them to build up in the reader’s thoughts before leading them to fruition in extended, shocking, amusing scenes. For instance, in Irving’s works, body parts tend to be lost: think of the speech organ in The Garp Novel, the digit in Owen Meany. Those absences echo through the story. In this novel, a major character suffers the loss of an limb – but we merely find out 30 pages later the conclusion.

The protagonist returns late in the book, but only with a last-minute impression of concluding. We do not do find out the complete story of her time in the Middle East. Queen Esther is a letdown from a writer who previously gave such pleasure. That’s the bad news. The upside is that The Cider House Rules – revisiting it together with this work – yet remains excellently, after forty years. So read it instead: it’s much longer as this book, but 12 times as great.