QUEEN ESTHER (2025)
By John Irving
Simon and Schuster, 432 pages.
★★★★
I was charitable when I reviewed The Last Chairlift in 2023. It was supposed to be the last novel from John Irving. That didn’t turn out to be the case, as late last year he released Queen Esther. It should have been everything I hate: a (semi-) sequel (of The Cider House Rules, 1985) and deals with shopworn themes such as wrestling (every novel since 1973’s 158-Pound Marriage); small people (A Prayer for Owen Meany, 1985); a male raised by feminists (The World According to Garp, 1978); confused sexual identity (Garp, In One Person, 2012), a lost limb (1981’s The Fourth Hand), and Vienna (every novel since his first, Setting Free the Bears, 1968). Speaking of bears, they are about the only thing in Queen Esther that’s not been recycled (and that includes Irving's fixation on penises). And yet… Queen Esther has its virtues.
John Irving might not be an author who goes to great lengths to avoid repetition, nor is he a careful self-editor. (Queen Esther could use both a developmental editor and a veto-proof copy editor.) All of this said, when it comes to storytelling, Irving can plausibly be compared to Charles Dickens. (Dickens also needed editors.)
Concerning the book’s title, in the Old Testament, Esther was married to Xerxes, the king of Persia. She was Jewish, but hid her identity. When Mordecai failed to bow lowly enough to satisfy Haman, Xerxes’ top advisor, Haman sought to exterminate the Jews. Esther’s intervention saved them and is the background to the Jewish holiday of Purim.
You’re wrong if you think Irving is making a backdoor political statement; he goes through the front door! This novel has been praised in Jewish sources, both because Irving carefully researched Jewish culture and is respectful of Zionism. Through his characters, Zionism is a desire not to be assimilated or persecuted, as well as moral battle to maintain Jewish identity. (Is it a mere coincidence that Haman is just one letter off from being Hamas?)
In the novel, three-year-old Esther Nacht (born in 1905) loses both of her parents to anti-Semites. She is sent to St. Cloud, Maine, which fans of Cider House Rules will recognize as the site of an orphanage (and underground abortion clinic) run by Dr. Wilbur Larch. Larch is an ether addict, but a kindly man who quickly realizes Esther as more world- and book-wise than most adults. After settling in, Esther becomes a beloved resident of St. Cloud’s, though the Jewish identity that she embraces is a problem; there just aren’t many Jews in St. Cloud. Larch finally locates a New Hampshire family to adopt Esther when she’s 15. Tommy and Connie Winslow aren’t Jewish, but they despise anti-Semitism, and Esther comes to regard them as her parents and their three daughters as her sisters. When Honor, an unexpected fourth is born, Esther practically raises her. She and Honor eventually share another bond; Honor wants to be a mother but is scared of childbirth and Esther wants to experience pregnancy, but has zero interest in parenting. Thus, a wrestler impregnates Esther and the child, James is given to Honor to raise. As in Garp, “Jimmy” grows up in a houseful of dominant women.
The bulk of the novel is devoted to Jimmy growing up in the 1960s. Esther and Honor persuade him to wrestle in the hope he will suffer an injury that will exempt him from the Vietnam War. He’s fine, but his interest in becoming fluent in German leads him to take his college JYA in Vienna, where he wrestles for exercise. There are two tough Russians who might be able to lame Jimmy, but they become friends rather than manglers. Plan two: If Jimmy can impregnate a woman he could secure a parentship exemption. This part of the novel is long on the ambiance of post-World War II Vienna. (Spoiler: It was gritty rather than elegant.) Jimmy wouldn’t mind losing his virginity to his beautiful tutor, Annaliese Eissler, but she has a more important mission to complete. His roomies in the tawdry boarding house are Claude, a French Jewish student, and Jolanda, a lesbian.
Jimmy, like his birth mother Esther, finds himself caught up in a world in which identity and history have imprinted his future. Add a few puppeteers pulling his strings and Jimmy is Garp version II. Some readers have complained that in Irving’s disjointed telling, Esther too often fades into the background. They’re not wrong!
Rob Weir
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