Irving's Queen Esther Review – A Letdown Follow-up to The Cider House Rules

If some authors have an peak phase, in which they reach the heights time after time, then American author John Irving’s extended through a sequence of four substantial, satisfying books, from his late-seventies success Garp to 1989’s Owen Meany. These were expansive, witty, big-hearted novels, connecting protagonists he refers to as “misfits” to societal topics from gender equality to reproductive rights.

Since A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing returns, aside from in page length. His previous work, the 2022 release The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages long of topics Irving had examined more skillfully in previous novels (selective mutism, short stature, trans issues), with a 200-page film script in the center to extend it – as if filler were required.

Therefore we look at a new Irving with reservation but still a faint glimmer of hope, which shines brighter when we find out that Queen Esther – a only four hundred thirty-two pages – “returns to the setting of The Cider House Novel”. That mid-eighties book is among Irving’s very best works, taking place largely in an institution in Maine's St Cloud’s, run by Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Wells.

The book is a letdown from a writer who previously gave such pleasure

In His Cider House Novel, Irving explored pregnancy termination and acceptance with vibrancy, comedy and an total understanding. And it was a significant book because it abandoned the topics that were evolving into annoying habits in his works: the sport of wrestling, wild bears, the city of Vienna, the oldest profession.

This book begins in the fictional village of Penacook, New Hampshire in the beginning of the 1900s, where Thomas and Constance Winslow welcome 14-year-old ward Esther from the orphanage. We are a several decades before the events of The Cider House Rules, yet Wilbur Larch stays identifiable: already dependent on anesthetic, beloved by his nurses, beginning every talk with “At St Cloud's...” But his appearance in Queen Esther is confined to these initial parts.

The Winslows fret about parenting Esther well: she’s from a Jewish background, and “how might they help a young girl of Jewish descent find herself?” To address that, we move forward to Esther’s later life in the Roaring Twenties. She will be involved of the Jewish emigration to the area, where she will enter the Haganah, the pro-Zionist armed organisation whose “goal was to protect Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would eventually form the core of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Those are enormous topics to tackle, but having introduced them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s disappointing that the novel is not actually about St Cloud’s and Wilbur Larch, it’s still more disheartening that it’s also not really concerning the main character. For motivations that must relate to narrative construction, Esther ends up as a surrogate mother for one more of the couple's children, and bears to a son, James, in World War II era – and the bulk of this story is the boy's tale.

And now is where Irving’s obsessions reappear loudly, both common and particular. Jimmy relocates to – of course – the Austrian capital; there’s discussion of avoiding the military conscription through bodily injury (Owen Meany); a pet with a significant designation (the animal, recall the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as grappling, prostitutes, writers and genitalia (Irving’s passim).

The character is a less interesting persona than the heroine suggested to be, and the supporting players, such as students Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s instructor the tutor, are one-dimensional too. There are a few enjoyable set pieces – Jimmy deflowering; a brawl where a couple of thugs get assaulted with a walking aid and a bicycle pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not ever been a subtle writer, but that is not the problem. He has always repeated his ideas, foreshadowed story twists and let them to accumulate in the audience's imagination before taking them to resolution in lengthy, jarring, amusing sequences. For case, in Irving’s books, anatomical features tend to be lost: recall the oral part in Garp, the finger in Owen Meany. Those losses echo through the narrative. In this novel, a major person is deprived of an limb – but we merely discover 30 pages later the finish.

Esther reappears toward the end in the story, but only with a final sense of concluding. We never do find out the entire story of her life in the region. Queen Esther is a failure from a novelist who once gave such delight. That’s the downside. The good news is that Cider House – upon rereading in parallel to this book – still stands up excellently, four decades later. So pick up the earlier work in its place: it’s much longer as Queen Esther, but far as great.