John Irving's Queen Esther Evaluation – A Letdown Sequel to His Earlier Masterpiece

If some authors have an imperial era, during which they reach the summit consistently, then American novelist John Irving’s ran through a series of several substantial, satisfying works, from his late-seventies success Garp to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. Such were expansive, humorous, compassionate books, tying figures he describes as “outliers” to social issues from gender equality to reproductive rights.

Since His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been diminishing outcomes, aside from in page length. His last book, 2022’s The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages in length of subjects Irving had examined more effectively in earlier works (selective mutism, short stature, transgenderism), with a lengthy screenplay in the heart to pad it out – as if filler were needed.

So we come to a recent Irving with reservation but still a faint flame of hope, which burns brighter when we discover that His Queen Esther Novel – a just 432 pages long – “revisits the world of The Cider House Novel”. That 1985 novel is one of Irving’s very best novels, set largely in an institution in Maine's St Cloud’s, run by Dr Wilbur Larch and his assistant Homer Wells.

The book is a failure from a novelist who previously gave such joy

In His Cider House Novel, Irving wrote about termination and belonging with richness, comedy and an total compassion. And it was a major book because it abandoned the subjects that were becoming tiresome tics in his novels: wrestling, wild bears, Austrian capital, the oldest profession.

The novel begins in the imaginary community of the Penacook area in the twentieth century's dawn, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow take in 14-year-old ward Esther from the orphanage. We are a several decades before the storyline of Cider House, yet Dr Larch stays familiar: already using anesthetic, adored by his staff, opening every address with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his appearance in the book is limited to these opening sections.

The family fret about bringing up Esther properly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “in what way could they help a teenage girl of Jewish descent find herself?” To address that, we flash forward to Esther’s later life in the twenties era. She will be involved of the Jewish emigration to Palestine, where she will enter the Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary group whose “goal was to safeguard Jewish towns from Arab attacks” and which would eventually form the basis of the IDF.

Those are enormous themes to tackle, but having brought in them, Irving backs away. Because if it’s frustrating that Queen Esther is not actually about St Cloud’s and the doctor, it’s all the more disheartening that it’s also not about the titular figure. For causes that must relate to narrative construction, Esther ends up as a gestational carrier for a different of the Winslows’ children, and bears to a son, Jimmy, in 1941 – and the bulk of this story is Jimmy’s story.

And here is where Irving’s preoccupations reappear loudly, both common and distinct. Jimmy goes to – of course – the Austrian capital; there’s discussion of dodging the draft notice through bodily injury (Owen Meany); a pet with a symbolic designation (the dog's name, recall the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as the sport, streetwalkers, novelists and male anatomy (Irving’s passim).

He is a more mundane character than Esther promised to be, and the secondary players, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor Annelies Eissler, are one-dimensional also. There are a few enjoyable set pieces – Jimmy losing his virginity; a confrontation where a handful of bullies get battered with a crutch and a bicycle pump – but they’re brief.

Irving has not ever been a subtle writer, but that is is not the difficulty. He has always restated his points, foreshadowed plot developments and allowed them to gather in the reader’s thoughts before taking them to resolution in lengthy, surprising, funny scenes. For instance, in Irving’s novels, anatomical features tend to go missing: recall the speech organ in Garp, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those missing pieces reverberate through the plot. In the book, a major character loses an limb – but we just learn thirty pages before the end.

Esther reappears in the final part in the novel, but merely with a final sense of wrapping things up. We do not learn the complete narrative of her time in the Middle East. This novel is a disappointment from a writer who in the past gave such pleasure. That’s the negative aspect. The good news is that The Cider House Rules – upon rereading in parallel to this novel – yet stands up beautifully, 40 years on. So read the earlier work as an alternative: it’s double the length as Queen Esther, but far as great.