Queen Esther 21st Century Edition

About one third of the way into Queen Esther by John Irving, I was thinking to myself the characters were unique in a New England gothic kind of way. They didn’t represent the traditional great American family, as the Winslows eschewed religion, most conventions of 20th century life and loved reading and education, but on their behalf, their own blended family was strong, supportive, and bonded. As I entered the second third of the book, I began to think “Words, so very many words!” I wondered what the word count was for this book. The problem wasn’t the number of words per se, but the fact they didn’t serve as vehicles moving a compelling story forward in a way that kept me eager to turn each page. By the final third of the book I was praying for the end to come, as I am afflicted with a kind of OCD that compels me to read to the end of every book I start, and most often sticking to it is worth it in the long run. 

One of Irving’s earlier books, The Cider House Rules, was described as a “bildungsroman”: per Wiki “…in literary criticism, a bildungsroman is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth and change of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood (coming of age). The term comes from the German words Bildung ('formation' or 'education') and Roman ('novel').” This description fits Queen Esther as we learn the history and life stories of each of three generations of the Winslow family, most particularly of Esther Nacht and her biological child James “Jimmy” Winslow who struggles with school more than his older family members did, and is a wrestler who becomes an author much as Irving himself. I don’t know if Irving had a challenging childhood, I do know he is a successful wrestler and author, but it seemed things didn’t come easy to James Winslow, who was a mediocre wrestler and seemed not to be a blockbuster author. 

Perhaps the kernel of value in this book’s narrative is you should always follow your passions, and live your most authentic life regardless of how others (family, friends, and community members) feel, because living the life that matters most to you is the best way to spend what precious time the universe allows. Despite family matriarch and patriarch Constance and Thomas’s aversion to religion, they embraced the importance of imbuing one of their adoptees with the one thing Esther’s mother had wished for prior to her murder, that the child should know she was a Jew and what that meant. The stunning cover to this book depicts three year old Esther’s arrival at the orphanage as she was dropped off by two antisemetic women after dark, who immediately rush away into the cover of night barely giving those inside answers to a handful of questions desperately shouted out to the fleeing individuals. Esther, the other main character in this novel, stands at the door as you see in the powerful cover art, but what it does not show is how she ferociously beat and kicked the door to be let in from the cold, and start this new page in her life.

Once Esther is inside the orphanage, the adults who opened the door for 

her believed she was older because of her height and the way she expressed herself. From those earliest moments of meeting her she shows a self advocacy that characterizes her throughout life.  Both the orphanage and her later adoptive family work hard to support the Jewishness and related life goals of this highly precocious child. Perhaps one of Irving’s messages is rather than foist your religious viewpoints on others in a political fashion, seek full understanding of what your religion means to you, and live your life accordingly, representing yourself and your religion (or non religion) as it manifests inside you, creating a live and let live world of true tolerance of all faiths, as opposed to using terrorism and war to construct a universal religious authoritarianism where execution is the cudgel of enforcement. 

The existential question still remains, can humanity’s collective unconscious embrace mankind’s similarities as shared strengths, or will our wired in predilections keep us forever psychologically seated before the monolith, bludgeons in hand awaiting the next battle for supremacy? Perhaps the solutions lie as close as the local library where countless examples of “the pen is mightier than the sword” are warehoused, awaiting selection, or a click in a digital library platform’s app. Thomas Winslow, the family patriarch wrote the orphanage physician in St. Cloud’s, “My schoolmates, all boys, weren’t inclined to divulge their innermost feelings to me, and none of us had any actual experiences worth sharing…It was the brave young characters in the novels I loved who shared their innermost feelings (and harrowing experiences) with me—those characters in literature taught me who I was.” Perhaps reading not dictation, education not indoctrination, and a steady diet of unconditional love ensure the greatest opportunities for the youngest among us, and the future of mankind as a species.