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If a few authors enjoy an imperial phase, in which they reach the heights repeatedly, then U.S. novelist John Irving’s extended through a run of four substantial, satisfying books, from his 1978 breakthrough The World According to Garp to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were generous, funny, big-hearted novels, connecting protagonists he calls “outsiders” to social issues from feminism to reproductive rights.

Since His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been declining returns, except in word count. His last novel, the 2022 release The Last Chairlift, was 900 pages in length of topics Irving had examined more effectively in prior works (mutism, dwarfism, gender identity), with a 200-page screenplay in the center to pad it out – as if filler were necessary.

Thus we approach a recent Irving with care but still a faint glimmer of expectation, which shines brighter when we discover that His Queen Esther Novel – a just 432 pages in length – “returns to the universe of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties work is one of Irving’s very best books, located mostly in an institution in Maine's St Cloud’s, operated by Dr Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Homer.

This novel is a disappointment from a novelist who in the past gave such joy

In Cider House, Irving wrote about termination and acceptance with colour, comedy and an all-encompassing empathy. And it was a significant work because it abandoned the themes that were evolving into tiresome habits in his novels: grappling, ursine creatures, the city of Vienna, prostitution.

The novel opens in the made-up village of New Hampshire's Penacook in the twentieth century's dawn, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow adopt 14-year-old orphan the protagonist from the orphanage. We are a several years before the storyline of Cider House, yet Dr Larch remains familiar: even then addicted to ether, beloved by his nurses, starting every address with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his presence in this novel is limited to these early parts.

The Winslows worry about bringing up Esther correctly: she’s Jewish, and “in what way could they help a teenage Jewish female discover her identity?” To address that, we jump ahead to Esther’s adulthood in the Roaring Twenties. She will be a member of the Jewish exodus to Palestine, where she will enter Haganah, the Zionist armed force whose “goal was to protect Jewish settlements from hostile actions” and which would eventually become the foundation of the Israel's military.

Such are huge topics to take on, but having presented them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s regrettable that Queen Esther is not actually about St Cloud’s and the doctor, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s likewise not really concerning the main character. For reasons that must connect to plot engineering, Esther becomes a gestational carrier for one more of the family's daughters, and gives birth to a baby boy, the boy, in the early forties – and the bulk of this story is Jimmy’s tale.

And here is where Irving’s obsessions reappear loudly, both regular and distinct. Jimmy goes to – where else? – the Austrian capital; there’s mention of avoiding the military conscription through bodily injury (His Earlier Book); a pet with a symbolic title (the dog's name, remember Sorrow from His Hotel Novel); as well as grappling, sex workers, authors and penises (Irving’s recurring).

He is a duller character than Esther promised to be, and the supporting players, such as students the pair, and Jimmy’s instructor Annelies Eissler, are flat as well. There are some enjoyable scenes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a fight where a few thugs get assaulted with a support and a bicycle pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not ever been a subtle novelist, but that is isn't the problem. He has always repeated his points, telegraphed narrative turns and enabled them to build up in the audience's thoughts before taking them to completion in long, jarring, amusing sequences. For case, in Irving’s works, body parts tend to go missing: recall the tongue in Garp, the finger in Owen Meany. Those missing pieces resonate through the plot. In Queen Esther, a central figure is deprived of an upper extremity – but we just find out thirty pages later the conclusion.

The protagonist returns toward the end in the story, but merely with a eleventh-hour sense of ending the story. We do not do find out the full story of her experiences in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a failure from a writer who once gave such delight. That’s the downside. The positive note is that Cider House – revisiting it alongside this novel – still stands up beautifully, after forty years. So choose the earlier work as an alternative: it’s much longer as the new novel, but far as enjoyable.