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If certain writers have an golden phase, where they hit the heights time after time, then U.S. author John Irving’s ran through a series of several fat, gratifying works, from his 1978 hit His Garp Novel to 1989’s His Owen Meany Book. Those were rich, witty, big-hearted novels, connecting protagonists he describes as “outliers” to societal topics from gender equality to reproductive rights.

After His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been diminishing outcomes, save in page length. His most recent book, the 2022 release The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages of subjects Irving had explored more skillfully in earlier works (inability to speak, short stature, transgenderism), with a two-hundred-page screenplay in the middle to extend it – as if padding were needed.

Therefore we look at a new Irving with reservation but still a tiny spark of hope, which shines brighter when we discover that His Queen Esther Novel – a only 432 pages – “revisits the world of The Cider House Novel”. That 1985 book is among Irving’s top-tier books, located mostly in an children's home in Maine's St Cloud’s, operated by Dr Wilbur Larch and his apprentice Homer.

Queen Esther is a disappointment from a novelist who once gave such pleasure

In The Cider House Rules, Irving explored pregnancy termination and acceptance with colour, wit and an all-encompassing understanding. And it was a significant novel because it left behind the topics that were evolving into annoying habits in his works: grappling, bears, Vienna, sex work.

This book begins in the made-up town of Penacook, New Hampshire in the twentieth century's dawn, where the Winslow couple welcome teenage ward the title character from the orphanage. We are a several decades ahead of the action of The Cider House Rules, yet Dr Larch remains familiar: already using anesthetic, beloved by his caregivers, beginning every speech with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his presence in the book is confined to these early parts.

The couple fret about bringing up Esther properly: she’s Jewish, and “how could they help a teenage Jewish girl find herself?” To address that, we move forward to Esther’s adulthood in the Roaring Twenties. She will be part of the Jewish emigration to the area, where she will become part of the Haganah, the pro-Zionist paramilitary group whose “purpose was to protect Jewish towns from opposition” and which would subsequently form the foundation of the Israel's military.

Such are enormous subjects to address, but having introduced them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that Queen Esther is hardly about St Cloud's and Wilbur Larch, it’s still more upsetting that it’s additionally not focused on the titular figure. For causes that must relate to narrative construction, Esther becomes a surrogate mother for one more of the Winslows’ offspring, and delivers to a son, Jimmy, in the early forties – and the lion's share of this story is Jimmy’s tale.

And at this point is where Irving’s preoccupations return strongly, both typical and distinct. Jimmy relocates to – of course – Vienna; there’s discussion of dodging the Vietnam draft through self-harm (Owen Meany); a dog with a meaningful name (Hard Rain, recall Sorrow from The Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, sex workers, novelists and male anatomy (Irving’s passim).

Jimmy is a less interesting figure than Esther promised to be, and the supporting players, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s instructor Annelies Eissler, are flat also. There are several amusing set pieces – Jimmy losing his virginity; a brawl where a handful of thugs get assaulted with a crutch and a tire pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not ever been a subtle novelist, but that is isn't the issue. He has repeatedly restated his ideas, telegraphed narrative turns and let them to build up in the audience's imagination before bringing them to resolution in extended, jarring, funny moments. For case, in Irving’s novels, anatomical features tend to disappear: remember the oral part in Garp, the finger in Owen Meany. Those losses resonate through the plot. In the book, a central person suffers the loss of an limb – but we just find out 30 pages the finish.

The protagonist reappears toward the end in the book, but only with a eleventh-hour feeling of wrapping things up. We never learn the complete narrative of her time in Palestine and Israel. The book is a failure from a author who in the past gave such joy. That’s the bad news. The good news is that The Cider House Rules – I reread it alongside this novel – even now remains wonderfully, 40 years on. So choose the earlier work as an alternative: it’s much longer as Queen Esther, but far as great.