Irving's Queen Esther Evaluation – An Underwhelming Companion to The Cider House Rules

If a few authors experience an golden phase, in which they reach the heights time after time, then American author John Irving’s lasted through a run of several substantial, gratifying novels, from his late-seventies hit Garp to the 1989 release A Prayer for Owen Meany. Those were expansive, funny, big-hearted works, tying characters he describes as “outsiders” to cultural themes from feminism to reproductive rights.

Following His Owen Meany Novel, it’s been waning outcomes, except in word count. His last novel, 2022’s The Last Chairlift, was nine hundred pages of themes Irving had explored more effectively in prior novels (selective mutism, restricted growth, trans issues), with a lengthy script in the center to fill it out – as if extra material were required.

So we look at a new Irving with care but still a small glimmer of optimism, which glows hotter when we find out that Queen Esther – a only 432 pages long – “goes back to the world of The Cider House Rules”. That 1985 book is among Irving’s top-tier novels, located primarily in an institution in St Cloud’s, Maine, managed by Wilbur Larch and his assistant Wells.

This novel is a failure from a writer who once gave such joy

In The Cider House Rules, Irving wrote about pregnancy termination and acceptance with richness, comedy and an all-encompassing compassion. And it was a important book because it left behind the themes that were becoming tiresome tics in his books: the sport of wrestling, wild bears, Vienna, sex work.

The novel opens in the imaginary community of Penacook, New Hampshire in the twentieth century's dawn, where Thomas and Constance Winslow adopt teenage orphan Esther from St Cloud's home. We are a a number of decades prior to the events of Cider House, yet the doctor is still recognisable: even then using the drug, respected by his staff, starting every speech with “Here in St Cloud’s …” But his presence in the book is confined to these early sections.

The couple are concerned about parenting Esther correctly: she’s of Jewish faith, and “how could they help a teenage Jewish girl discover her identity?” To answer that, we jump ahead to Esther’s later life in the twenties era. She will be part of the Jewish migration to Palestine, where she will enter the Haganah, the Jewish nationalist paramilitary organisation whose “purpose was to defend Jewish towns from opposition” and which would later establish the core of the IDF.

Such are huge themes to take on, but having presented them, Irving avoids them. Because if it’s regrettable that Queen Esther is not actually about the orphanage and Wilbur Larch, it’s even more upsetting that it’s likewise not about the titular figure. For motivations that must connect to plot engineering, Esther becomes a surrogate mother for one more of the family's children, and bears to a son, James, in World War II era – and the majority of this story is his story.

And now is where Irving’s obsessions return strongly, both common and distinct. Jimmy goes to – naturally – the Austrian capital; there’s mention of evading the draft notice through self-mutilation (His Earlier Book); a dog with a significant designation (the animal, remember the earlier dog from Hotel New Hampshire); as well as wrestling, streetwalkers, authors and genitalia (Irving’s throughout).

Jimmy is a more mundane figure than the heroine hinted to be, and the secondary players, such as young people the two students, and Jimmy’s tutor Eissler, are one-dimensional as well. There are a few amusing scenes – Jimmy deflowering; a fight where a handful of ruffians get beaten with a crutch and a air pump – but they’re here and gone.

Irving has not once been a delicate author, but that is is not the issue. He has always repeated his arguments, hinted at narrative turns and allowed them to build up in the reader’s imagination before taking them to fruition in long, shocking, funny moments. For instance, in Irving’s books, anatomical features tend to go missing: think of the oral part in Garp, the finger in His Owen Book. Those losses resonate through the plot. In this novel, a central figure is deprived of an limb – but we just discover thirty pages before the finish.

She returns in the final part in the book, but just with a eleventh-hour sense of ending the story. We never do find out the entire narrative of her life in the region. Queen Esther is a disappointment from a author who previously gave such delight. That’s the downside. The positive note is that Cider House – I reread it in parallel to this work – yet stands up excellently, after forty years. So choose it instead: it’s double the length as Queen Esther, but a dozen times as good.