“All happy families are alike,” Leo Tolstoy wrote in his novel Anna Karenina. “Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
In his new novel Queen Esther, John Irving (the acclaimed author of more than a dozen novels, such as The World According to Garp; The Cider House Rules; and A Prayer for Owen Meany) tells the story of a happy family that is unlike any other family.
As the novel begins, Thomas Winslow, a teacher of English literature at a boarding school in New Hampshire, and his wife, Constance, a librarian, hire 14-year-old Esther Nacht as a nanny to help raise their daughter, Honor.
Born in Vienna in 1905, Esther immigrated to Portland, Maine, with her parents. Her father died en route, and when antisemites murdered her mother, three-year-old Esther became the only Jew in a local orphanage.
When Honor reaches adulthood, Esther, who has established an extraordinary bond with the Winslow family, returns to Europe to fight Nazis and help Jews immigrate to Israel. She also agrees to get pregnant and give birth to a baby that the asexual Honor will raise.
In the ensuing decades, Esther helps her biological son, Jimmy – who is being raised by the non-Jewish Winslow family – from afar, while playing a significant role in Israel’s creation.
Jimmy, an aspiring writer, assumes center stage for the remainder of the novel. Clumsily and poignantly, he tries to obey Honor’s request that he “knock up” a girl during his study abroad year so that he can get a deferment and avoid military service in Vietnam.
Meanwhile, Irving returns to his signature subjects: circumcision, tattoos, wrestling, and the endless possibilities of sexual attraction and intercourse. He examines works by the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Arthur Schnitzler, and Anne Frank, the films High Noon and The Seventh Seal, and songs by Bob Dylan.
The novel ends with Jimmy’s brief “reunion” with his mother during a book tour in Israel. Esther, a left-wing, non-observant Jew, has criticized prime minister Menachem Begin’s “uncompromising position on Israel’s retaining the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” But she also qualifies claims that conquered and subjugated people have “the right and duty” to fight for their freedom, but “not if these same people seek to eliminate the Jews.”
“This eternal conflict, this everlasting hatred,” Jimmy realizes, was what Esther was protecting him from.
“At last,” Irving tells us, “Jimmy knew who he was… a daydreaming woebegone ‘Winslow boy’ with a brave Jewish girl inside him. Who would forever be an ally of Queen Esther.”
– Glenn C. Altschuler