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If certain writers enjoy an peak phase, in which they hit the heights repeatedly, then U.S. writer John Irving’s lasted through a series of several long, gratifying works, from his late-seventies hit The World According to Garp to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. These were generous, witty, warm novels, connecting figures he describes as “misfits” to societal topics from women's rights to reproductive rights.

Following Owen Meany, it’s been waning returns, save in word count. His last novel, the 2022 release The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages in length of topics Irving had explored more skillfully in previous novels (selective mutism, dwarfism, transgenderism), with a lengthy screenplay in the center to fill it out – as if extra material were needed.

Thus we approach a latest Irving with care but still a faint glimmer of hope, which burns brighter when we find out that Queen Esther – a mere four hundred thirty-two pages in length – “returns to the universe of The Cider House Novel”. That 1985 novel is among Irving’s top-tier books, set largely in an children's home in Maine's St Cloud’s, managed by Dr Larch and his apprentice Homer Wells.

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

In The Cider House Rules, Irving explored termination and belonging with richness, comedy and an all-encompassing understanding. And it was a important work because it abandoned the themes that were evolving into annoying patterns in his works: wrestling, ursine creatures, Austrian capital, prostitution.

Queen Esther begins in the imaginary community of Penacook, New Hampshire in the beginning of the 1900s, where Mr. and Mrs. Winslow take in teenage ward the title character from St Cloud’s. We are a few years before the action of Cider House, yet Dr Larch is still familiar: even then using anesthetic, respected by his caregivers, beginning every speech with “In this place...” But his role in Queen Esther is limited to these initial scenes.

The couple worry about bringing up Esther well: she’s Jewish, and “how could they help a young Jewish female understand her place?” To address that, we move forward to Esther’s later life in the Roaring Twenties. She will be part of the Jewish emigration to the region, where she will join Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary group whose “goal was to defend Jewish settlements from opposition” and which would later establish the foundation of the Israeli Defense Forces.

These are massive subjects to tackle, but having introduced them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s disappointing that the novel is hardly about St Cloud's and Dr Larch, it’s even more disheartening that it’s also not really concerning Esther. For causes that must relate to plot engineering, Esther ends up as a substitute parent for one more of the couple's children, and delivers to a male child, the boy, in 1941 – and the lion's share of this story is the boy's tale.

And here is where Irving’s preoccupations reappear loudly, both common and specific. Jimmy relocates to – where else? – the city; there’s talk of evading the Vietnam draft through self-mutilation (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a pet with a symbolic title (the dog's name, recall the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as grappling, prostitutes, novelists and penises (Irving’s passim).

Jimmy is a less interesting character than the heroine suggested to be, and the supporting characters, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor the tutor, are one-dimensional too. There are a few amusing set pieces – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a confrontation where a handful of ruffians get battered with a support and a air pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not ever been a delicate author, but that is is not the issue. He has always repeated his arguments, hinted at plot developments and enabled them to build up in the reader’s mind before leading them to completion in long, shocking, funny sequences. For example, in Irving’s books, anatomical features tend to disappear: think of the speech organ in Garp, the hand part in Owen Meany. Those losses echo through the plot. In this novel, a key character loses an limb – but we merely find out thirty pages before the conclusion.

She returns toward the end in the novel, but only with a last-minute impression of ending the story. We not once discover the entire story of her life in the Middle East. This novel 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 – upon rereading alongside this work – still stands up excellently, four decades later. So choose the earlier work in its place: it’s double the length as the new novel, but far as good.