Just in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas, John Irving has served up a turkey in QUEEN ESTHER.
A cider house ruse, QUEEN ESTHER, John Irving’s latest novel, is being touted as a return to the realm of Dr Larch and his Princes of Maine, Kings of New England.
The Esther of the title is the offspring of Jewish immigrants, born in Vienna, orphaned in New England, adopted at age 14 by the Pennacook, New Hampshire, Winslows, becoming both sister and surrogate in an overstuffed odyssey of misappropriated Zionism.
Should have judged this book by its cover, a cutesy image of a doll size girl on a snowy night standing on a porch waiting to enter a house full of light. It suspiciously resembles a children’s book and by and by the style and prose is a repetitive, dumbing down descriptive, a sub par Dickens, jejune, juvenile and jarring.
Had QUEEN ESTHER been half its page number, Irving may have got away with the folksy parable, for the narrative starts well, and the eccentric Winslows, Tommy and Connie, are drawn as characters you want to spend some time with.
The vignette at Dr. Larch’s St. Cloud’s orphanage is a reminder of the wonderful The Cider House Rules. One is left yearning for more of this ether addict and abortionist and his nest of neonatal nurses, but alas he and they are given short shrift in a chapter or two.
So QUEEN ESTHER is not about Dr. Wilbur Larch or Tommy and Connie, or even Esther, but about Jimmy, the Winslow’s grandson, a eugenic Jew, conceived in not dissimilar manner to Irving’s earlier marvellous creation, Garp. But the world according to Jimmy is nowhere near as fascinating as the progeny of Jenny’s ball turret gunner.
Irritatingly reiterative, QUEEN ESTHER is a huge canvas rendered small, an absence of substance that fits as well as the glass slipper on the ugly sisters.
John Irving’s ability to weave complex characters and intricate narratives that challenge and captivate seems to have dissipated but his obsessions with wrestling, writers, Vienna and venereal disease, prostitutes and penises prevails.
QUEEN ESTER by John Irving is published by Scribner.
