Queen Esther by John Irving Evaluation – A Letdown Follow-up to His Earlier Masterpiece

If a few authors experience an golden era, where they hit the pinnacle repeatedly, then U.S. author John Irving’s lasted through a sequence of four substantial, satisfying novels, from his 1978 hit The World According to Garp to 1989’s Owen Meany. These were generous, funny, warm works, connecting protagonists he calls “outsiders” to social issues from gender equality to reproductive rights.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been waning returns, aside from in size. His most recent book, the 2022 release The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages in length of themes Irving had explored more skillfully in earlier works (mutism, dwarfism, gender identity), with a 200-page screenplay in the heart to pad it out – as if filler were required.

Therefore we look at a recent Irving with care but still a faint glimmer of optimism, which glows brighter when we discover that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages in length – “revisits the world of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties novel is part of Irving’s very best books, taking place mostly in an orphanage in the town of St Cloud’s, operated by Wilbur Larch and his assistant Wells.

The book is a failure from a writer who in the past gave such pleasure

In The Cider House Rules, Irving explored abortion and belonging with colour, wit and an comprehensive empathy. And it was a major novel because it left behind the subjects that were turning into repetitive patterns in his novels: grappling, wild bears, the city of Vienna, the oldest profession.

The novel begins in the fictional town of the Penacook area in the early 20th century, where the Winslow couple adopt 14-year-old ward Esther from St Cloud's home. We are a few years ahead of the storyline of The Cider House Rules, yet Wilbur Larch remains recognisable: still dependent on ether, beloved by his caregivers, opening every talk with “At St Cloud's...” But his presence in the book is confined to these opening sections.

The family worry about bringing up Esther correctly: she’s from a Jewish background, and “in what way could they help a teenage Jewish female find herself?” To tackle that, we flash forward to Esther’s later life in the Roaring Twenties. She will be involved of the Jewish migration to the region, where she will join Haganah, the Zionist armed organisation whose “mission was to protect Jewish communities from Arab attacks” and which would later become the core of the IDF.

Such are enormous topics to tackle, but having presented them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s disappointing that the novel is not really about St Cloud’s and the doctor, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s likewise not focused on Esther. For reasons that must involve narrative construction, Esther turns into a substitute parent for a different of the Winslows’ offspring, and bears to a baby boy, the boy, in World War II era – and the lion's share of this story is the boy's narrative.

And now is where Irving’s preoccupations reappear loudly, both typical and specific. Jimmy relocates to – of course – the city; there’s mention of evading the military conscription through self-mutilation (His Earlier Book); a dog with a meaningful designation (the animal, recall Sorrow from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, sex workers, writers and genitalia (Irving’s throughout).

The character is a duller character than the heroine promised to be, and the secondary figures, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor Eissler, are underdeveloped as well. There are a few nice set pieces – Jimmy deflowering; a fight where a handful of bullies get battered with a walking aid and a tire pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not once been a delicate author, but that is is not the problem. He has consistently repeated his arguments, foreshadowed plot developments and let them to accumulate in the audience's imagination before bringing them to resolution in lengthy, surprising, amusing sequences. For instance, in Irving’s novels, physical elements tend to go missing: remember the speech organ in Garp, the finger in Owen Meany. Those absences echo through the narrative. In the book, a major person suffers the loss of an upper extremity – but we only learn 30 pages before the end.

She comes back late in the book, but just with a final impression of wrapping things up. We not once discover the full narrative of her time in the Middle East. The book is a failure from a author who previously gave such pleasure. That’s the downside. The positive note is that Cider House – revisiting it together with this work – yet remains wonderfully, 40 years on. So choose that in its place: it’s much longer as this book, but a dozen times as great.