The author is to be applauded for exploring fundamental questions of Jewish identity in this era of misguided political correctness, but his manuscript needs a brutal edit
December 12, 2025 12:30
Back in the late-20th-century glory days, American literature was dominated by two elites: the great Jewish novelists, from Bellow to Roth; and then the WASP Brahmins who charted the private lives of their rarified class, of whom John Updike was once the undisputed king. That mantle was inherited by John Irving, who became a household name with the publication of The World According To Garp in 1978 and The Hotel New Hampshire three years later.
The publication of a novel by any one member of this A-list would have, back then, been greeted with uncontrollable fan frenzy and media hoo-ha. Any self-respecting dinner party guest would have been duty bound to read it so as to be ready to proffer an informed view.
Now comes Irving’s latest, greeted with a fanfare so barely audible it would have been unimaginable until recently. That is a measure both of the fact that literature is no longer de rigueur in polite society in the way it once was, but also of how far Irving’s star has fallen after the disappointment of his more recent work.
Queen Esther has its roots in an encounter with a Holocaust survivor Irving had on a trip he made to Israel while visiting an international book fair in Jerusalem in 1981 – the exact time and place for a pivotal chapter in the novel. (He returned to Israel last year, voicing his support for the country – “I’m pro-Jewish, I’m pro-Israel” – although caveating he was “not necessarily in favour of your present leader”.)
The story draws also upon his experience of living in Vienna for a year as a student in the Sixties, when he befriended a Jewish fellow American roommate who opened his eyes to antisemitism.
The initial setting is a century ago, in the rural Maine orphanage St Cloud’s (first glimpsed in Irving’s 1985 novel The Cider House Rules), where Vienna-born Esther Nacht is abandoned as a young child one night after her mother has been murdered in an antisemitic attack.
A decade on and Esther is adopted as a teenager by a wealthy, good-hearted family, the Winslows, for whom she acts as a kind of au pair to their own children, though they quickly come to regard her as another daughter too. These are decent folk. From there the meandering plot wanders into familiar Irving territory – unorthodox families, a healthy interest in sex, and his lifelong passion for wrestling – admixed with an exploration of the evolution of Jewish identity over the 20th century through the life of Esther, along with echoes of her biblical namesake’s story.
The hopes of Irving fans that this might be a fully fledged return to form must be managed
The pivot point is Esther’s agreement to be impregnated and bear a baby on behalf of a Winslow girl, Honor (Irving has a Dickensian relish for names that do what they say on the tin) much to the scandal of the local town’s gentlefolk. The chosen father is a Jewish wrestler, Moshe. The resultant child, Jimmy, belongs to Honor but it is Esther who rears the boy.
He grows up to become an understandably confused young man, struggling to resolve the questions of his identity and living a life that stops off in a few of the landmarks of Irving’s own – attending the University of New Hampshire, travelling abroad to study in Vienna.
Interwoven with Jimmy’s adventures are those of Esther in Europe and her involvement in the first few decades of the state of Israel.
Of the good intentions there can be no doubt. Irving fully commits to exploring fundamental questions of Jewish identity from an outsider’s perspective, and there’s a particular delight to having an unapologetically Zionist heroine at the heart of the novel in an era in which publishers run scared of misguided political correctness.
Still the hopes of Irving fans that this might be a fully fledged return to form must be managed.
The warmth, humour and winning eccentricity of the author at his best are present but only intermittently, and to earn those rewards you have to wade through forbiddingly dense long passages in which a sometimes impenetrable authorial voice drowns out the pleasures.
Readers will hope next time around Irving can call upon a brutally frank editor to help wrestle his manuscript into the best possible shape.
Queen Esther, by John Irving
(Scribner)
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