Novelist John Irving says he knew he was on track when he figured out how “Queen Esther” would end. Now he faced a new challenge: How the story began.
“Like all my novels, that’s the thing I see most clearly or I don’t begin,” Irving says on a recent video call from his home in Toronto. “A timeline begins that is instigated by the end.
“If that’s where it ends, and who these characters are, well, where does it begin? How old were they then?” he says. “I’m making my way back.”
In writing “Queen Esther,” Irving found sparks of inspiration in his real life and in the fictional themes and settings he’s long been drawn to explore.
Esther Nacht is a Jewish child born in Vienna in 1905 and orphaned as a child of 3 in Maine. As a teen, she works as a nanny for a New Hampshire family’s youngest daughter, Honor. They become best friends and even as Esther returns to Vienna on the eve of World War II, she agrees to give birth to a child for Honor to raise.
That child, Jimmy Winslow, grows up in New Hampshire with his mother Honor and her sisters and their parents, eventually learning the truth about Esther, too. As a young man and aspiring novelist, he travels to Vienna for a college year abroad, never quite knowing how his two mothers are secretly plotting to protect him from war, antisemitism, and the dangers they present.
At the end of the book, Jimmy, who has never met his birth mother Esther, travels to Jerusalem in 1981 for a book fair and – well, we don’t want to give too much away, do we?
Esther gets the title role in the novel, but she’s more of an invisible hand, guiding the action, similar to one of Irving’s best-loved earlier characters.
“Dr. Larch is a main character of ‘The Cider House Rules,’ but he’s not the one you see on the page most of the time,” Irving says of the doctor who runs the orphanage in St. Cloud’s, Maine, in his sixth novel.
“He’s not there, but he’s the reason everything happens,” he says. “He’s the behind-the-scenes motivator of everything that happens in the book.”
In “Queen Esther,” Larch and the orphanage return – Esther is delivered there after she is orphaned – but only in supporting roles.
“I knew who I wanted for a main character,” Irving says of “Queen Esther.” “I wanted to create a trajectory for an empathetic Zionist. One of those earliest of the European Jews who left Europe when they should have, just before they wouldn’t be able to, and who were instrumental in founding the state of Israel.
“And I thought, ‘OK, what is the most empathetic path I can imagine for my Esther?’” he says. “I wanted [Esther to be] a child who, by the age of 3, her life had already been shaped by antisemitism.
“Once I knew her trajectory, then I thought, ‘Oh, I know just the orphanage for her,” Irving says and laughs.
When he realized that Esther would be in her late 70s in 1981, Irving saw the entirety of her arc. By the end of the book, he realized, she was “a long-established Israeli who’s been up to every secretive thing imaginable, who’s been the behind-the-scenes protector of my point-of-view character Jimmy.”
The pieces started to fall in place, and the novel emerged on the pages before him.
‘A truthful exaggeration’
The incorporation of Dr. Larch and the St. Cloud’s orphanage is, of course, a direct link to Irving’s earlier work. But other key moments in “Queen Esther” also have origins in Irving’s past.
“I’ve said that Jimmy is, in my view, a truthful exaggeration of myself, both in his unawareness as a student in Vienna and his unawareness in Jerusalem in 1981,” Irving says.
Like Jimmy, Irving spent an academic year in Vienna in the early ’60s.
“My Jewish roommate, in the time I described for Jimmy, opened my eyes to the antisemitism still lingering in Vienna, which otherwise I’m sure would’ve gone over my head,” he says. “He was the reason there was a consciousness of what it meant to be Jewish.”
After Irving’s 1978 novel “The World According to Garp” became his first bestseller, he was signed by publishers in various European countries who sold his books in translation.
Several of them were European Jews with strong ties to Israel; one put him in contact with a publisher there, and they all encouraged him to join them at the 1981 Jerusalem International Book Fair, which is the event that brings Jimmy to Israel at the end of “Queen Esther.”
“That experience of being in Israel for the first time with these very knowledgeable Jews with long-standing ties to Israel [was significant],” Irving says. “And working, as Jimmy is, with a Hebrew translator, in my case, translating ‘The Hotel New Hampshire.’
“It was so different to me,” he says. “The tensions and conflicts were so new that I thought if I don’t write this down, I’m not going to remember it. And it raised a lot of questions of ‘where is this going’?
“A number of my novels are historical. It’s not a coincidence that the most political of them are often the most historical. The history really matters to me, and I set out to write a pro-Jewish, pro-Israel novel as an ally from the point of view of someone who isn’t Jewish.”
Point of view
Irving is not Jewish, which is why he says Jimmy Winslow, the character through whom the reader primarily experiences “Queen Esther,” worked as his protagonist.
“I was choosing him to be the not-a-Jew, the last one in the room to learn, so to speak, which I’d always felt about myself,” Irving says. “And Esther is the one who, for pages and pages of the novel, she’s not there. But we know who’s making things happen.”
One of the things about which Esther is determined is that Jimmy not be raised in the faith of his ancestors.
“If anyone should know how unsafe it is to be Jewish, it would be my girl Esther,” Irving says. “So of course, it would Esther’s foremost purpose to keep Jimmy from being Jewish. Even though, come on, the Jewish mother and the Jewish father? He is Jewish! But Esther won’t let it happen.”
Irving says he wouldn’t have considered writing the book from the point of view of Esther because of the characteristics she embodies – a proud, if nonobservant Jew, an Israeli, a defender of the nation of Israel.
But he also believes that writers have the right to create people and worlds outside their own experiences in their fiction, as he notes he often has in his historical novels.
“I’ve been an advocate for women’s rights and abortion rights,” Irving says, referring to “The Cider House Rules.” “I’ve been a long-standing advocate for LGBTQ rights and I’m a straight guy.” [His 2022 novel “The Last Chairlift” revolves around a New England writer with a lesbian mother and trans stepfather.]
“I think making an ally of yourself to some fictional characters is more than permitted,” he says, then adding, “And yes, you are responsible for getting the facts right, getting the details right.”
Irving says that responsibility was underscored for him when “The Cider House Rules” was published.
“The greatest irony was that there were no medical, no history mistakes in the area of obstetrics and gynecology,” he says. “None. But having worked every summer from the age of 15 into my 20s in the apple orchards, the mistake I made was about apple farming.
“It was about the difference between the poisons you use for mice and the poisons you use for woodchucks,” Irving says. “And I didn’t check it because I thought I remembered it. It was a lesson to me that your memory, as is written in “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” your memory is a monster.”
As for those who’d scold you to stick to your life’s lane in literature?
“I do call out those critics and writers who, perhaps out of lack of imagination of their own, want their fellow fiction writers also to only, as Hemingway boringly said, ‘Write what you know,’” Irving says. “Well, I never would have become a writer if Ernest Hemingway had been my model.
“I think that’s a denial of the importance of imagination,” he says. “Tell it to Shakespeare. As far as we know, he did not have a lot of contacts with royal families. Tell it to Sophocles.
“As a novelist, you’re obligated to make up a better story than a memoir. Anyone’s memoir. Because a memoir may be full of some interesting things, but it’s also full of unrelated things.
“Where our novelist’s responsibility is to kill the unrelated things and focus on what you want to have happen,” Irving says. “I mean, what misplaced hubris it is to think that your own life is staggeringly interesting to others. Mine wouldn’t be.”
‘Walk the walk’
In July 2024, Irving returned to Jerusalem. He’d written the last chapter of “Queen Esther,” the ending he’d envisioned back at the start of his work. He’d sent that to Israeli friends to be fact-checked and get feedback.
Now he wanted to return to the narrow streets and neighborhoods he’d written from memories of his first journey to Jerusalem in 1981, and listen for the whispers of the voices that he’d heard there once upon that time.
“What you lose is the visual,” Irving says. “I mean, I had done that walk that Jimmy makes into the Old City from the Damascus Gate all the way to the Jewish Quarter to meet his translator. That was a walk I was more familiar with than Jimmy.
“But I needed to walk the walk, so to speak,” he says.
“I knew that I had accurately transcribed everything that was said to me, or everything that I’d overheard in April 1981,” Irving continues. “But if you’re claiming that this is historical fiction and it is accurate to time and place, what I didn’t know was if everything I heard was being commonly said at the time.”
In “Queen Esther,” Jimmy’s Jewish and Israeli friends talk about the never-ending conflict between the Jewish and Palestinian populations in Israel. Peace requires compromise and reconciliation, one character tells Jimmy, but the centuries-old fight over the land seemed never to end.
Irving asked his friends whether those sentiments were widely felt at the time. “I needed to know,” he says. “I needed them, and of course, they looked at me like I was crazy and said, ‘Duh, are you crazy?’
“I felt no uncertain confirmation,” Irving says. “This historical novel ended where it should have ended. That was what I wanted Jimmy to be hearing from the various people who are talking to him. ‘Uh oh, those settlements in the West Bank, the settlements in Gaza, that does not bode well for a two-state solution.”
In 2024, not yet a year since the terror attacks of Hamas on Israel’s Jewish communities, and the fierce and devastating response of the Israeli military on Gaza, Irving says that the foreboding he’d wanted Jimmy to feel had become terrifyingly more.
“I hadn’t seen the degree to which that ending [of “Queen Esther”] foreshadowed what Jimmy thinks of as an eternal conflict and an everlasting hatred,” Irving says.
‘Cat in Christ’s tomb’
There’s a footnote of grace to the story Irving tells of his most recent trip to Israel in 2024.
In the book, Jimmy visits Christ’s tomb at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City. A Christian pilgrim emerges from the darkness of the tomb, crying, Jesus touched me!”
In truth, that would-be miracle arrived on little cat feet.
Irving says that when he arrived in July, not April as he’d originally planned, he found that the war between Gaza and Israel had scared off many tourists, the scorching summer heat discouraging many more. The Old City was deserted, the religious sites that usually drew throngs of visitors almost empty.
“It was unimaginable to be in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself with no one else,” Irving says. “And to see that darkened tomb with only the candles to light.
“And it was probably some advantage to me that I am not a religious person or a believer when I went into it,” he says. “I’m wearing shorts and a T-shirt. It’s 98 degrees.”
Inside, he felt a presence, a palpable presence.
“I felt the cat brush against my bare leg while I’m standing at the tomb,” he laughs. “Before it said, ‘Meow.’ I didn’t panic.
“My mind did not move into the extraterrestrial spaces,” Irving says. “I thought, ‘That feels like a cat.’ And it was so hot outside, of course, the cat wanted to get out of the heat.”
Irving returned to Toronto and added the scene of the pilgrim in weeping ecstasy, Jimmy watching as a small animal tiptoed out of the shadows behind him.
“That was the cat in Christ’s tomb,” he says. “If I’d gone back sooner, on schedule, I might have missed that.”