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If certain novelists experience an peak phase, where they achieve the heights repeatedly, then U.S. author John Irving’s extended through a sequence of several substantial, gratifying novels, from his late-seventies success Garp to 1989’s His Owen Meany Book. These were generous, funny, warm books, connecting protagonists he describes as “misfits” to societal topics from women's rights to abortion.

After Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing returns, save in page length. His previous novel, 2022’s The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages long of subjects Irving had examined more skillfully in prior novels (selective mutism, short stature, transgenderism), with a lengthy film script in the center to extend it – as if filler were required.

So we come to a latest Irving with care but still a tiny spark of expectation, which burns hotter when we find out that His Queen Esther Novel – a mere four hundred thirty-two pages in length – “revisits the universe of The Cider House Novel”. That 1985 work is among Irving’s top-tier books, located largely in an orphanage in the town of St Cloud’s, managed by Dr Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Homer Wells.

The book is a disappointment from a novelist who previously gave such delight

In His Cider House Novel, Irving wrote about abortion and identity with vibrancy, wit and an all-encompassing compassion. And it was a important novel because it moved past the topics that were becoming repetitive habits in his novels: the sport of wrestling, bears, Vienna, prostitution.

The novel starts in the made-up town of Penacook, New Hampshire in the twentieth century's dawn, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow welcome teenage orphan Esther from the orphanage. We are a a number of decades prior to the events of His Earlier Novel, yet Wilbur Larch stays recognisable: already using the drug, adored by his staff, opening every address with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his presence in the book is restricted to these initial parts.

The couple are concerned about parenting Esther well: she’s from a Jewish background, and “in what way could they help a young Jewish female understand her place?” To address that, we move forward to Esther’s adulthood in the 1920s. She will be part of the Jewish exodus to the region, where she will join Haganah, the Jewish nationalist militant organisation whose “purpose was to defend Jewish settlements from opposition” and which would later become the basis of the Israel's military.

These are huge topics to address, but having brought in them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that this book is not actually about St Cloud's and Dr Larch, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s additionally not really concerning the titular figure. For motivations that must connect to plot engineering, Esther becomes a substitute parent for a different of the Winslows’ offspring, and bears to a male child, James, in 1941 – and the bulk of this story is his narrative.

And here is where Irving’s fixations return strongly, both common and specific. Jimmy goes to – where else? – the Austrian capital; there’s mention of avoiding the draft notice through self-mutilation (His Earlier Book); a dog with a significant title (Hard Rain, meet the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, sex workers, novelists and genitalia (Irving’s recurring).

The character is a duller persona than the female lead suggested to be, and the minor characters, such as pupils Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s tutor the tutor, are one-dimensional too. There are some nice scenes – Jimmy losing his virginity; a brawl where a couple of bullies get beaten with a crutch and a tire pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not ever been a nuanced writer, but that is is not the issue. He has repeatedly repeated his points, hinted at narrative turns and allowed them to build up in the reader’s imagination before bringing them to completion in long, shocking, entertaining scenes. For case, in Irving’s works, anatomical features tend to be lost: think of the oral part in Garp, the digit in Owen Meany. Those absences reverberate through the story. In this novel, a key character suffers the loss of an limb – but we only discover thirty pages the conclusion.

Esther comes back toward the end in the book, but merely with a eleventh-hour feeling of wrapping things up. We do not discover the full narrative of her experiences in the region. Queen Esther is a disappointment from a writer who previously gave such pleasure. That’s the negative aspect. The upside is that His Classic Novel – I reread it in parallel to this novel – yet remains beautifully, after forty years. So pick up the earlier work as an alternative: it’s twice as long as Queen Esther, but 12 times as great.