John Irving speaks the way he writes: in full paragraphs that swirl and eddy down countless side streams before returning to the channel from which they sprung. On a three-hour Zoom call from Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay, where he summers on an island his wife’s grandfather won in a card game, he holds forth on maritime tattooing, fish farming in the Israeli desert, and the post-WWII partition of Vienna, among other topics tangentially related to his 16th novel, Queen Esther, out this November from Simon & Schuster. With his windblown white hair, sleeveless T-shirt, and salt-and-pepper mustache, he looks like a Key West barfly, or a character out of Moby-Dick. No wonder—he has a sperm whale and the novel’s last four words (“only found another orphan”) tattooed on his left forearm.
The mustache is new, a by-product of the same old wrestling injuries that finally forced him, on doctor’s orders, to stop writing his novels longhand. “I was getting so many muscle spasms, finger cramps,” he says. “I kept cutting my nose and my upper lip.” Otherwise, at 83 years old and nearly six decades into his career, he appears to be in fighting shape: thick armed, barrel-chested, wolfish. It’s a good thing, too, because Queen Esther, like so many of his previous novels, is destined to ruffle some feathers.
Inspired by the biblical story of Esther, the novel is a prequel of sorts to Irving’s 1985 bestseller, The Cider House Rules. As an infant in 1907, the title character emigrates from Vienna to the U.S. with her Jewish parents, only for her father to die of pneumonia on the crossing and her mother to be killed by antisemites in Portland, Maine. Abandoned on the steps of the orphanage in St. Cloud’s, she becomes a favorite of its director, Dr. Wilbur Larch, decades before he meets and cares for Homer Wells in Cider House. From New England, Esther journeys in search of her roots to Vienna in 1934, and then to Mandatory Palestine, where she plays a shadowy role first in the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organization, and then, after Israel’s 1948 founding, in the Israeli Defense Forces and the Mossad.
Another writer might take one look at today’s headlines and shelve his novel centered on such a character. Not Irving, who, beginning with the 1978 publication of his National Book Award–winning fourth novel, The World According to Garp, went on an extraordinary decade-long run that made him one of America’s most popular and most controversial writers. At the same time the Christian right was altering the landscape of U.S. politics, Irving was writing in frank and explicit terms about abortion, rape, incest, homosexuality, gender fluidity, and religious hypocrisy. His novels of this era—Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, and A Prayer for Owen Meany—made heroes out of sexual outsiders, abortion providers, and mothers who didn’t want to be wives. All four were bestsellers; all four have been banned or challenged by conservatives. As recently as 2022, a school district in Texas removed Cider House from library shelves after deeming it “inappropriate.”
“It’s unspeakable,” Irving says of such efforts. “We all know that the burning of books led the Nazis to other, bolder tactics, right? Not just symbolically but historically, it was always a sign of worse to come.”
Born in New Hampshire in 1942, Irving has lived full-time in Canada since 2015 and became a dual citizen in 2019. In protest, he says, against “Trump’s authoritarian overreach of his executive powers and the cowardly Republicans who have been complicit in their silence,” he will not be coming to the U.S. to promote Queen Esther, a decision he informed Simon & Schuster about when his editor, Jonathan Karp, was preparing to submit the novel for consideration for the National Book Award. “I think what I said to John was, I wouldn’t come when Führer Trump and his Brownshirts were running things,” Irving recalls. “But I’m sure he worded that in another way.”
One doesn’t have to look far to discover the deeply personal roots of Irving’s politics. It’s there on his bicep, where the name of his transgender daughter, Eva, is tattooed, and in his biography, elements of which have appeared time and again in his fiction. “My mother was an abortion rights activist before there were abortion rights,” he says. “I sometimes say it’s a good thing Roe v. Wade wasn’t dismantled before she died, because it would have killed her.”
Irving grew up knowing nothing about his biological father. His mother, Frances Winslow, got remarried when Irving was six, to Colin Irving, a history teacher. “He’s the reason why all the step-fathers in my novels are heroes,” Irving says. “He was mine.” So much so that in the early 1980s, when his mother finally showed him the letters his biological father had written to her after being shot down over Burma in WWII, in which he asked for a divorce but sought to maintain a relationship with his son, Irving did not seek him out.
“I did not ever want to make my stepfather feel that he wasn’t enough of a father for me,” he explains. Only in 2001 did Irving
meet his half siblings and learn that his father, who had since died, regularly attended his high school wrestling matches.
Irving’s fierce loyalty to loved ones animates Queen Esther, which draws from two formative episodes in his life. The first is his college year abroad in 1960s Vienna (the setting of his 1968 debut novel, Setting Free the Bears), where he had a Jewish American roommate who became a lifelong friend. “He opened my eyes to antisemitism,” Irving says, recalling how mystified he was that when he would leave his name for a table at a restaurant the waiter would suddenly treat him differently. “Meanwhile, my Jewish roommate, who was very tall and blonde with blue eyes, knew what was going on. He would say to the waiter, ‘Ich bin der Jude, du Idiot’—I’m the Jew, you idiot. I remember saying to him once, ‘Don’t they realize that if my first name was Irving chances are good I would be Jewish, but my last name being Irving is a Scottish name?’ And he looked at me very calmly and said, ‘Who ever told you that antisemites are smart?’ ”
Queen Esther ends in Jerusalem in 1981, the same year Irving first visited the city. “The first people who translated me were European Jews with long-standing ties to Israel,” he recalls. “They were my favorite people.” At a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was heating up, being in Jerusalem with them and with his Hebrew translator, a concentration camp survivor, was “both moving and disturbing,” he says. “I had an awareness of not just a friction but what felt to me like an eternal conflict.”
On a trip back to Jerusalem in July 2024, Irving found the Old City emptied of the religious tourists he remembered from 40 years earlier. The October 7 attacks and Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza had prevented his friend Marty Schwartz, to whom Queen Esther is dedicated, from making the trip with him. At an event at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim cultural center, Irving told the audience, “I’m pro-Israel, I’m pro-Jewish, and I’m for you. That may not necessarily mean that I’m in favor of your present leader.” The line “drew thunderous applause,” the Jerusalem Post reported.
For a long time, Irving knew he wanted to complement the Moby-Dick tattoo on his left forearm with a tattoo of what he judged to be the best last line from his own novels on his right forearm. When he finally decided on the final refrain from The Cider House Rules—“Good night, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England”—he worried that his skin, after years of sun damage, wouldn’t be thick enough to hold the ink. But with the help of a little touching up to remove some blurring, it was. As he prepares to step back onto the mat with critics new and old, it just might be a sign of what’s to come.
