(Simon & Schuster, 408 pages)
Esther was 3 years old, almost 4, when she was left outside a Maine orphanage, where the staff found her angrily kicking the door. “Esther doesn’t cry — she just gets angry,” it is later said of the child.
The toddler had a well-developed vocabulary and had memorized passages from the Book of Esther of the Bible. She knew she was Jewish. But it would be years before anyone would learn that she was born in Vienna and came to the U.S. with her parents, both now dead.
The orphanage where tough little Esther is left, St. Cloud’s, is well-known to those familiar with The Cider House Rules, the John Irving novel that later became a film for which Irving won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay 25 years ago. Queen Esther is not a sequel, although its themes will be familiar to Irving fans — perhaps wearily so.
Esther will live at St. Cloud’s for a decade until she is offered a job — and a home — with Thomas and Constance Winslow, residents of Pennacook, New Hampshire, and the parents of four daughters named after the virtues: Faith, Hope, Prudence and Honor.
Like Dr. William Larch, the physician who runs the orphanage (played by Michael Caine in the Cider House movie), the Winslows are not fans of religion or the concept of God. They are ideologically at odds with the pearl-clutching “townspeople of Pennacook,” despite Thomas Winslow’s best efforts to open their minds at “Town Talks” where he endeavors to instruct them about the great books and convince them that morality is not the equivalent of conventionality.
Thomas Winslow is comically opposed to anything related to Maine; at one point, his wife thinks “Oh, Tommy, please give up the grudge you have against Maine!” But the couple need a new au pair to care for their youngest child, Honor, and they have run out of options elsewhere. So they travel to St. Cloud’s and adopt Esther despite the objections of people shocked that they would want “the Jewish one.”
It’s a good match, for the child and the couple. Like Esther, the Winslows are prodigious readers (which gives Irving a chance to proselytize his most favored 19th-century authors through his characters, as is his habit), and they are taking in a young woman who intends to get a tattoo that is a quote from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
The quote permeates the novel, even as Irving wrests the focus from Thomas and Constance Winslow, to Esther Nacht, to Jimmy Winslow, the child that Esther ultimately gives birth to and gives to Honor to raise, in accordance with a pact they have made.
The journey is winding, complex and transcontinental. Esther goes off to Israel to fulfill what she sees as her life’s purpose, and the child she conceived, Jimmy Winslow, grows up and becomes a father and a writer and tries to sort out his complicated roots, insisting all his life that he is “just a New Hampshire boy,” although in reality he is not a Pennacook townie and never will be.
This is ironic, since the Winslow line was genealogical royalty in America; the ancestors of both Thomas and Constance sailed on the Mayflower, and, as Irving writes, “If you grew up in Pennacook, in southeastern New Hampshire, in the 1940s and 1950s, where you came from mattered.” But so did adherence to a certain set of standards that didn’t include unconventional families and overlooked far more grievous sins. And Jimmy’s conundrum is that he isn’t really a Winslow by blood and doesn’t identify as Jewish; despite being ardently loved by people on multiple continents, he is not really sure who he is.
Irving is a master at character development, and 100 pages in, I was so invested in the lives of Thomas and Constance Winslow that I was reluctant to leave their world to delve into Esther’s, and Jimmy’s. Nor was I prepared for the degree of preaching to which I would be subjected about social and international issues.
Indeed, it is Irving’s preaching that is an obstacle to be overcome in enjoying this novel. As evidenced here and throughout his body of work, he has strong opinions on reproductive choice, on non-traditional families and on religion, opinions which he intends to inculcate into his readers with all the subtlety of a hammer. Even as Irving riffs on the pious townspeople of Pennacook for their moralizing, he moralizes with the same unyielding zeal, denying the microphone to any timid nuance that might want to offer an opposing view. This belligerent approach at times comes off as a grudge.
In one scene, Jimmy visits what is believed to be the tomb of Jesus Christ at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and observes a weeping man who leaves the cave, “his face streaked with tears, his smile radiant.”
“Jesus touched me — I felt him touch me!” the lunatic Christian cried,” Irving writes, and in the insertion of the word “lunatic,” we feel the full force of those who harbor animosity toward religion and believe its ills outweigh its good, even though it later becomes apparent that the man had been touched by a cat, and not a deity.
Irving once told an interviewer that he believes “it’s vain and presumptuous to presume that what you believe, everyone else should also believe. …. In other words, people who are so convinced of their religions that they proselytize it to others, I find very tiresome.”
It’s unclear if Irving is aware of how much he proselytizes to others of his own values and beliefs. Nonetheless, he is, like Jimmy Winslow, “a New Hampshire boy” and one of New England’s most important contemporary writers. If some parts of Queen Esther feel like reconstituted sermons from The Cider House Rules or The World According to Garp, this does not preclude the reader taking pleasure in the world of the Winslows.
But offer thoughts and prayers for the poor. maligned, monocultural “townspeople of Pennacook” — not to be mistaken with the good people of the village of Penacook in Concord — as you read. B
Featured Photo: Queen Esther
