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If certain authors experience an imperial era, during which they achieve the pinnacle consistently, then American novelist John Irving’s ran through a run of several long, rewarding books, from his 1978 hit His Garp Novel to 1989’s His Owen Meany Book. Such were expansive, witty, warm novels, connecting characters he describes as “misfits” to cultural themes from feminism to termination.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been diminishing returns, save in word count. His previous novel, the 2022 release The Chairlift Book, was 900 pages long of topics Irving had explored better in previous novels (selective mutism, dwarfism, transgenderism), with a two-hundred-page script in the middle to extend it – as if extra material were necessary.

So we come to a latest Irving with care but still a faint flame of expectation, which burns stronger when we learn that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages in length – “revisits the world of The Cider House Rules”. That 1985 work is among Irving’s top-tier novels, located largely in an children's home in the town of St Cloud’s, managed by Dr Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Homer.

The book is a letdown from a author who in the past gave such delight

In The Cider House Rules, Irving discussed termination and identity with vibrancy, wit and an total understanding. And it was a major novel because it left behind the subjects that were becoming annoying tics in his works: the sport of wrestling, bears, Vienna, prostitution.

The novel starts in the fictional village of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow take in 14-year-old ward Esther from St Cloud’s. We are a few years prior to the action of His Earlier Novel, yet the doctor remains recognisable: even then using anesthetic, beloved by his nurses, beginning every speech with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his presence in this novel is limited to these initial parts.

The family are concerned about bringing up Esther well: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how could they help a teenage Jewish girl understand her place?” To tackle that, we jump ahead to Esther’s grown-up years in the Roaring Twenties. She will be involved of the Jewish emigration to Palestine, where she will join the paramilitary group, the pro-Zionist paramilitary organisation whose “mission was to protect Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would eventually form the basis of the IDF.

Those are huge topics to address, but having brought in them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s regrettable that the novel is not actually about St Cloud’s and Wilbur Larch, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s additionally not about Esther. For reasons that must involve story mechanics, Esther ends up as a gestational carrier for one more of the Winslows’ daughters, and delivers to a baby boy, 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 fixations return strongly, both regular and distinct. Jimmy goes to – where else? – the city; there’s discussion of dodging the Vietnam draft through self-mutilation (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a dog with a meaningful title (the animal, recall Sorrow from His Hotel Novel); as well as the sport, streetwalkers, novelists and penises (Irving’s passim).

Jimmy is a less interesting persona than Esther hinted to be, and the supporting players, such as pupils the pair, and Jimmy’s instructor the tutor, are flat too. There are some enjoyable episodes – Jimmy deflowering; a brawl where a couple of thugs get beaten with a support and a air pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has never been a delicate writer, but that is is not the issue. He has consistently repeated his ideas, telegraphed story twists and allowed them to accumulate in the audience's mind before leading them to completion in lengthy, surprising, amusing scenes. For instance, in Irving’s books, body parts tend to disappear: remember the speech organ in The Garp Novel, the digit in His Owen Book. Those absences resonate through the narrative. In the book, a central person loses an limb – but we merely discover thirty pages before the end.

She reappears late in the story, but just with a eleventh-hour sense of ending the story. We not once discover the full narrative of her life in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a failure from a author who in the past gave such joy. That’s the bad news. The upside is that Cider House – revisiting it in parallel to this novel – even now stands up excellently, 40 years on. So choose the earlier work as an alternative: it’s much longer as Queen Esther, but far as great.