It has been many years since I read one of Irving’s books.  I had loved  National Book Award winning “The World According to Garp” (1978) and “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (1989) but had lost contact with this prolific New Hampshire/Toronto author.  “Queen Esther” is Irving’s 16th book.  Many of his earlier works were adapted for the cinema, TV, and the stage, and he even won an Oscar in 2000 for the Best Adapted Screenplay.

I’m still not sure how I feel about this book, a big 420 page novel that spans the 20th Century and  the world from Pennacook, NH to Vienna and Jerusalem and introduces us to a fine set of characters.  I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s primarily the characters, not the setting, the plot, or perhaps even the writing, that draws me to a work of fiction, and the characters in this big sprawling, messy novel are terrific.

Start with the Winslow family of Pennacook.  We meet Jimmy (James) Winslow in the second paragraph of the first page decades before his actual birth, and his family tree is slowly filled in—grandparents Thomas, an English teacher at Pennacook Academy and Constance the town librarian, his four aunts Faith, Hope, Prudence, and Honor, and the au pairs who came from orphanages and became part of the family, especially the last one, Esther from St. Cloud Orphanage.

The plot turns on the fact that Esther was Jewish. Only four years old at the time she arrived at St. Cloud after her mother had been murdered in Portland ME by anti-semites, the only information Dr. Larch had was that she was Jewish, four years old, and an orphan.  By the time Esther arrived to help the Winslows she was 15 and committed to becoming Jewish.  All of that is relatively straight-forward, but the book becomes increasingly weird when Jimmy’s Aunt Honor and au pair Esther decide to have a baby, Esther doing the carrying and birthing and Honor doing the mothering. Hence, the resultant Jimmy.

We spend considerable time with the now 21 year old Jimmy in Vienna where he is on junior year abroad and living with two roommates, the Dutch lesbian Jolanda and the French philosophy student, Claude. Their adventures with their landlady, her daughter, and her grandson, with the Jewish and Russian wrestlers, with their local coffee house, and with the German Shepherd, Hard Rain (ala the Dylan song) are often hilarious, and always entertaining, at least for a while.

I found the book a bit of a slog even though I loved the characters, and as I often do when I am not smitten with a book, I checked the reviews after finishing it.  Peter Orner, an acquaintance who is Chair of the English Department at Dartmouth and a fabulous writer, reviewed the book in the NYT, and while generally positive, did note that the book was “plagued by an infuriating repetition“.  John Self, in “The Guardian”, was even more negative expressing ‘disppointment’ at Irving’s obsessive focus on wrestling, sex, prostitutes,Vienna, and dogs.

At the end of the day, like Self, I think I would skip “Queen Esther” and go back to ‘Cider House Rules” which Self describes as “twice as long and twelve times better.”