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If a few novelists enjoy an peak era, in which they achieve the pinnacle consistently, then American author John Irving’s ran through a series of four fat, satisfying novels, from his late-seventies breakthrough The World According to Garp to 1989’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Such were generous, witty, big-hearted books, connecting figures he describes as “misfits” to societal topics from women's rights to reproductive rights.

Following A Prayer for Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing outcomes, except in size. His most recent work, 2022’s His Last Chairlift Novel, was 900 pages of themes Irving had explored more skillfully in previous works (inability to speak, short stature, gender identity), with a two-hundred-page film script in the center to pad it out – as if filler were needed.

So we come to a new Irving with caution but still a tiny glimmer of expectation, which shines brighter when we learn that Queen Esther – a just 432 pages long – “goes back to the world of His Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties work is part of Irving’s top-tier works, located primarily in an children's home in Maine's St Cloud’s, managed by Dr Larch and his assistant Homer Wells.

This novel is a letdown from a author who once gave such pleasure

In His Cider House Novel, Irving explored termination and identity with vibrancy, wit and an total understanding. And it was a significant work because it moved past the themes that were becoming annoying tics in his works: the sport of wrestling, ursine creatures, the city of Vienna, sex work.

This book starts in the imaginary village of Penacook, New Hampshire in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow take in teenage orphan Esther from St Cloud’s. We are a few years ahead of the action of Cider House, yet the doctor is still familiar: even then addicted to anesthetic, respected by his caregivers, opening every address with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his appearance in the book is limited to these initial sections.

The couple fret about raising Esther correctly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how could they help a adolescent Jewish female understand her place?” To answer that, we move forward to Esther’s grown-up years in the 1920s. She will be a member of the Jewish emigration to the area, where she will become part of the paramilitary group, the pro-Zionist militant force whose “mission was to defend Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would later establish the basis of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Those are huge subjects to address, but having introduced them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s regrettable that Queen Esther is not really about the orphanage and Wilbur Larch, it’s all the more disappointing that it’s also not really concerning Esther. For causes that must involve plot engineering, Esther turns into a surrogate mother for one more of the couple's daughters, and bears to a son, Jimmy, in World War II era – and the lion's share of this book is Jimmy’s story.

And here is where Irving’s fixations reappear loudly, both typical and particular. Jimmy relocates to – naturally – the city; there’s mention of dodging the Vietnam draft through self-mutilation (His Earlier Book); a pet with a significant title (the dog's name, recall the earlier dog from His Hotel Novel); as well as grappling, streetwalkers, writers and male anatomy (Irving’s passim).

Jimmy is a more mundane character than the female lead promised to be, and the secondary figures, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor Eissler, are flat also. There are a few amusing set pieces – Jimmy deflowering; a brawl where a few thugs get beaten with a crutch and a bicycle pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not once been a nuanced author, but that is is not the difficulty. He has repeatedly reiterated his points, foreshadowed story twists and enabled them to accumulate in the audience's thoughts before bringing them to completion in lengthy, shocking, entertaining sequences. For instance, in Irving’s books, body parts tend to be lost: think of the tongue in Garp, the digit in His Owen Book. Those absences resonate through the story. In the book, a key figure loses an arm – but we only find out thirty pages before the end.

She reappears late in the novel, but only with a eleventh-hour feeling of ending the story. We not once discover the full story of her life in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a failure from a author who previously gave such delight. That’s the bad news. The positive note is that The Cider House Rules – upon rereading in parallel to this book – still holds up wonderfully, four decades later. So read it as an alternative: it’s double the length as the new novel, but a dozen times as enjoyable.