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If a few authors enjoy an peak phase, during which they hit the heights time after time, then American novelist John Irving’s ran through a run of several substantial, rewarding novels, from his late-seventies success The World According to Garp to the 1989 release Owen Meany. Those were generous, witty, big-hearted books, connecting figures he describes as “outliers” to cultural themes from gender equality to reproductive rights.

Since His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been diminishing results, except in word count. His last work, 2022’s The Last Chairlift, was 900 pages long of subjects Irving had delved into more skillfully in previous works (inability to speak, short stature, transgenderism), with a lengthy script in the center to fill it out – as if padding were required.

Therefore we come to a new Irving with care but still a faint spark of expectation, which shines stronger when we learn that His Queen Esther Novel – a only four hundred thirty-two pages – “goes back to the world of The Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties book is one of Irving’s very best novels, set mostly in an institution in Maine's St Cloud’s, operated by Dr Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Wells.

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

In Cider House, Irving explored termination and acceptance with colour, wit and an comprehensive compassion. And it was a important novel because it moved past the themes that were evolving into annoying patterns in his novels: wrestling, ursine creatures, Austrian capital, sex work.

This book starts in the imaginary village of New Hampshire's Penacook in the twentieth century's dawn, where Thomas and Constance Winslow welcome teenage ward the protagonist from St Cloud’s. We are a several generations before the storyline of His Earlier Novel, yet Dr Larch stays identifiable: still using anesthetic, beloved by his staff, beginning every speech with “At St Cloud's...” But his appearance in the book is restricted to these initial scenes.

The Winslows worry about raising Esther properly: she’s Jewish, and “in what way could they help a young Jewish girl understand her place?” To address that, we jump ahead to Esther’s grown-up years in the twenties era. She will be involved of the Jewish exodus to the area, where she will enter Haganah, the Zionist armed group whose “mission was to protect Jewish communities from Arab attacks” and which would later become the basis of the Israeli Defense Forces.

These are enormous topics to take on, but having presented them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s regrettable that the novel is hardly about St Cloud’s and the doctor, it’s all the more upsetting that it’s likewise not focused on the titular figure. For motivations that must relate to narrative construction, Esther turns into a surrogate mother for another of the couple's children, and delivers to a son, James, in the early forties – and the lion's share of this story is Jimmy’s tale.

And here is where Irving’s obsessions come roaring back, both common and distinct. Jimmy goes to – naturally – the city; there’s discussion of avoiding the military conscription through bodily injury (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a pet with a significant designation (the animal, meet the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, prostitutes, writers and male anatomy (Irving’s passim).

The character is a more mundane persona than the heroine hinted to be, and the supporting figures, such as pupils the pair, and Jimmy’s tutor Eissler, are flat as well. There are a few nice episodes – Jimmy losing his virginity; a confrontation where a couple of bullies get battered with a walking aid and a bicycle pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has never been a nuanced author, but that is is not the difficulty. He has always repeated his ideas, telegraphed narrative turns and allowed them to build up in the audience's imagination before taking them to fruition in extended, jarring, amusing sequences. For instance, in Irving’s books, body parts tend to go missing: recall the oral part in Garp, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those absences reverberate through the narrative. In the book, a major person suffers the loss of an arm – but we just find out 30 pages before the conclusion.

Esther comes back toward the end in the story, but merely with a last-minute impression of concluding. We never discover the complete narrative of her experiences in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a disappointment from a novelist who in the past gave such joy. That’s the bad news. The upside is that The Cider House Rules – revisiting it alongside this work – still remains beautifully, after forty years. So pick up the earlier work instead: it’s double the length as Queen Esther, but a dozen times as great.