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If certain authors enjoy an peak period, where they reach the heights time after time, then American novelist John Irving’s extended through a run of several substantial, rewarding works, from his late-seventies hit The World According to Garp to 1989’s Owen Meany. These were rich, funny, warm novels, tying characters he describes as “misfits” to social issues from feminism to termination.

Since Owen Meany, it’s been declining returns, aside from in page length. His most recent book, 2022’s The Chairlift Book, was nine hundred pages of topics Irving had examined more effectively in previous works (inability to speak, dwarfism, gender identity), with a two-hundred-page script in the middle to pad it out – as if extra material were needed.

Thus we approach a latest Irving with caution but still a faint glimmer of optimism, which burns stronger when we find out that Queen Esther – a mere 432 pages – “goes back to the setting of The Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties book is part of Irving’s very best works, located primarily in an children's home in the town of St Cloud’s, run by Dr Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Homer Wells.

Queen Esther is a disappointment from a writer who previously gave such joy

In Cider House, Irving explored termination and identity with vibrancy, comedy and an total empathy. And it was a major novel because it moved past the subjects that were evolving into repetitive habits in his books: wrestling, bears, the city of Vienna, sex work.

The novel opens in the made-up town of the Penacook area in the beginning of the 1900s, where Thomas and Constance Winslow take in teenage orphan the title character from St Cloud’s. We are a few generations ahead of the storyline of Cider House, yet the doctor is still identifiable: still dependent on ether, respected by his caregivers, starting every talk with “At St Cloud's...” But his appearance in the book is confined to these early scenes.

The couple worry about raising Esther correctly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how might they help a teenage Jewish female understand her place?” To answer that, we flash forward to Esther’s later life in the twenties era. She will be involved of the Jewish emigration to the area, where she will enter the Haganah, the Jewish nationalist militant organisation whose “mission was to protect Jewish settlements from hostile actions” and which would eventually establish the basis of the Israeli Defense Forces.

These are huge themes to tackle, but having brought in them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s frustrating that Queen Esther is not really about the orphanage and the doctor, it’s still more upsetting that it’s also not about Esther. For motivations that must connect to plot engineering, Esther ends up as a substitute parent for another of the family's offspring, and gives birth to a baby boy, the boy, in the early forties – and the lion's share of this story is his narrative.

And at this point is where Irving’s obsessions reappear loudly, both common and distinct. Jimmy relocates to – naturally – Vienna; there’s discussion of avoiding the Vietnam draft through self-harm (Owen Meany); a dog with a significant name (the dog's name, remember the canine from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as the sport, streetwalkers, novelists and genitalia (Irving’s passim).

He is a duller character than Esther suggested to be, and the minor figures, such as pupils Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s teacher Eissler, are flat also. There are a few nice episodes – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a fight where a handful of ruffians get battered with a walking aid and a tire pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has not once been a subtle writer, but that is is not the issue. He has always restated his points, hinted at story twists and allowed them to gather in the reader’s imagination before bringing them to resolution in lengthy, jarring, amusing sequences. For case, in Irving’s novels, body parts tend to disappear: remember the oral part in The Garp Novel, the finger in Owen Meany. Those losses reverberate through the narrative. In this novel, a major character suffers the loss of an limb – but we merely discover thirty pages before the finish.

Esther comes back late in the novel, but just with a final sense of concluding. We not once learn the full account of her experiences in Palestine and Israel. The book is a letdown from a novelist who once gave such joy. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Cider House – upon rereading together with this novel – even now stands up excellently, after forty years. So read the earlier work as an alternative: it’s much longer as the new novel, but 12 times as enjoyable.