Queen Esther

Irving revisits the setting of The Cider House Rules with a baggy novel about a Viennese Jewish orphan and her adoptive family in New Hampshire. Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905 and loses her father to pneumonia during the family’s passage across the Atlantic when she is two. She and her mother, Hanna, settle in Portland, Maine, where Hanna is killed by an antisemite when Esther is three. Esther then winds up in the orphanage run by Dr. Wilbur Larch, a character from Cider House, before she’s adopted as a teen by the tolerant and patrician Thomas Winslow and his wife. In the late 1930s, Esther travels to Jerusalem and aids a Zionist paramilitary group. After Israel’s independence in 1948, she becomes involved with the Israeli Defense Forces and engages in heroic exploits well into her 70s. Long stretches of the novel are devoted to her biological son, Jimmy, who is raised by Thomas’s daughter, and grows up to become a novelist. It’s tough to find a clear through line, and Irving sidetracks the proceedings for extended digressions into the history of circumcision and other matters. There’s fun to be had in his bawdy wordplay, however, as when Jimmy, visiting Thomas in the hospital after a stroke, misunderstands a nurse’s use of the word “labile” and “imagine[s] his unfortunate grandfather as emotionally vaginal.” Unfortunately, such moments are too few and far between to save this jumbled tale. (Nov.)