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If certain novelists experience an imperial period, in which they hit the pinnacle time after time, then American writer John Irving’s ran through a sequence of four long, satisfying works, from his 1978 breakthrough The World According to Garp to 1989’s His Owen Meany Book. Those were expansive, witty, big-hearted novels, tying characters he refers to as “misfits” to social issues from women's rights to abortion.

After Owen Meany, it’s been diminishing outcomes, aside from in word count. His last book, 2022’s The Chairlift Book, was nine hundred pages in length of subjects Irving had examined more skillfully in previous works (inability to speak, dwarfism, gender identity), with a 200-page screenplay in the center to extend it – as if filler were required.

So we approach a recent Irving with caution but still a small spark of optimism, which burns brighter when we find out that Queen Esther – a just four hundred thirty-two pages long – “returns to the world of The Cider House Rules”. That mid-eighties novel is part of Irving’s very best books, 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 letdown from a novelist who in the past gave such pleasure

In His Cider House Novel, Irving discussed termination and belonging with vibrancy, wit and an total understanding. And it was a important novel because it moved past the subjects that were evolving into tiresome tics in his novels: grappling, wild bears, Austrian capital, the oldest profession.

The novel opens in the made-up village of the Penacook area in the twentieth century's dawn, where Thomas and Constance Winslow take in teenage orphan Esther from the orphanage. We are a few decades ahead of the action of The Cider House Rules, yet the doctor stays identifiable: even then addicted to the drug, respected by his nurses, opening every address with “In this place...” But his presence in the book is confined to these initial scenes.

The couple worry about parenting Esther correctly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how could they help a teenage girl of Jewish descent find herself?” To tackle that, we flash forward to Esther’s later life in the Roaring Twenties. She will be part of the Jewish emigration to the region, where she will enter the paramilitary group, the Zionist militant force whose “mission was to safeguard Jewish communities from hostile actions” and which would subsequently become the core of the IDF.

Those are massive topics to tackle, but having introduced them, Irving dodges out. Because if it’s frustrating that this book is not actually about St Cloud's and the doctor, it’s all the more disappointing that it’s also not really concerning Esther. For causes that must connect to narrative construction, Esther turns into a gestational carrier for another of the couple's children, and gives birth to a male child, Jimmy, in 1941 – and the lion's share of this novel is the boy's story.

And now is where Irving’s preoccupations return strongly, both common and particular. Jimmy relocates to – where else? – the Austrian capital; there’s discussion of avoiding the draft notice through self-harm (A Prayer for Owen Meany); a pet with a symbolic title (Hard Rain, recall Sorrow from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as the sport, prostitutes, authors and genitalia (Irving’s throughout).

Jimmy is a less interesting character than the heroine hinted to be, and the secondary figures, such as pupils Claude and Jolanda, and Jimmy’s tutor Annelies Eissler, are one-dimensional also. There are some nice set pieces – Jimmy his first sexual experience; a confrontation where a few bullies get battered with a crutch and a bicycle pump – but they’re short-lived.

Irving has not ever been a subtle writer, but that is is not the issue. He has consistently repeated his ideas, hinted at narrative turns and allowed them to build up in the audience's imagination before bringing them to resolution in lengthy, shocking, amusing scenes. For instance, in Irving’s books, anatomical features tend to disappear: think of the oral part in The Garp Novel, the digit in Owen Meany. Those losses reverberate through the narrative. In this novel, a central person suffers the loss of an limb – but we just learn thirty pages before the conclusion.

The protagonist reappears in the final part in the novel, but merely with a last-minute feeling of wrapping things up. We not once learn the complete narrative of her time in Palestine and Israel. Queen Esther is a failure from a author who in the past gave such pleasure. That’s the downside. The positive note is that His Classic Novel – I reread it alongside this novel – still holds up wonderfully, after forty years. So read that as an alternative: it’s twice as long as Queen Esther, but 12 times as good.