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the complete review - Non/Fiction / Literature

Miss Herbert
(The Delighted States)

by
Adam Thirlwell

[an overview of the reviews and critical reactions]

general information | review summaries | links | about the author

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Why we haven't reviewed it yet:
Requested a copy but haven't received one; may have to wait for US publication (4/2008)


Chances that we will review it:
Very good

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  Review Consensus:

  Barely impressed, and most think it something of a mess

  From the Reviews:

• "Miss Herbert is a thoughtful, and frequently hilarious, study of the nature of literary translation. It is also a work of art, a new form." - A.S.Byatt, Financial Times
  
  
• "Miss Herbert is about the globalisation of the novel. (...) These moments of literary anecdotage, vivid, partisan, often eccentric, give Thirlwell his materials. (...) These stories and analyses are propelled in short, sometimes whimsically titled sections of brisk, bouncy sentences. Reading Thirlwell is like pounding along an unpredictable, slightly over-reactive boardwalk. It's a spoken style, sometimes the chummy side of spoken, sometimes the ear-bending side of chummy. Still, every page has good things. (...) Miss Herbert is not always original, not always sensible, and not always true, but it remains its own thing, and there is far more good in it than bad." - Michael Hofmann, The Guardian
  
  
• "Miss Herbert is a sort of literary commonplace book, laden with assiduously researched stories about a very specific band of Euronovelists (....) All this smoke makes it hard to see whom Miss Herbert is aimed at. (...) Occasionally Thirlwell appears to forget about his obligations to authorial simpering and starts writing an altogether more muscular critical prose. Sunk deep in the morass of Miss Herbert's self-indulgence is a deft and thought-provoking piece of work. Whether the reader will stick around long enough to get it out is another matter." - Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "His range is wider than his continence, and we sometimes wonder what his point is beyond the demonstration of his own acuity. This is a shame, because Thirlwell is clearly very clever. (...) It is Eurocentric, eclectic and full of entertaining anecdotes (.....) His hauteur is all the more irritating for the many gems amid the verbiage. (...) Reading Miss Herbert is inevitably enriching, but too often one is reminded of Kingsley Amis's hapless protagonist in Lucky Jim, wrestling with an academic essay and cringing at "the pseudo-light it threw on non-problems"." - Toby Lichtig, New Statesman
  
  
• "Adam Thirlwell clearly has a lot of charm. (...) Only a major charmer could secure this level of collaboration for such a monumentally annoying book. (...) His conceit (the word is the right one) is that his book is a sort of inside-out novel, whose characters are famous writers. (...) Thirlwell's style shows signs of a helpless aspiration to the epigram, without the compressive knack required (.....) Miss Herbert is full of propositions that contradict one another, when they aren't nonsensical in their own right (.....) He is nowhere near ready to share his wisdom with the world, and his editors have done him no favours with their indulgence." - Adam Mars-Jones, The Observer
  
  
• "But this is nevertheless a thought-provoking book. In the end, Thirlwell arguably does deliver on his promise, since he traces literary style (or at least one branch of it) through the ages. However, given that this is a work which praises the digressive and tricky, it is tempting finally to think of it as a Shandean cock-and-bull story -- a yarn about yarn-spinners, occasionally troublesome, but written with intelligence, wit and great enthusiasm." - Simon Baker, The Spectator
  
  
• "(T)he scholarly showmanship is impressive and he flourishes his paradoxes with panache. Here is a novel that "is not really a novel", one with a theme and variations but "no plot, no fiction, and no finale". In a jet-lagged version of literary history, Diderot and Kundera, Joyce and Hrabal are collaborators. (...) The reader frequently responds to Thirlwell’s broader assertions with "Yes, but" or (more often) "Yes, and ? " (.....) It seems that Thirlwell can’t decide whether he is writing “an inside-out novel”, producing a look-at-me-mum firework display or instructing those less fortunate than himself in how to appear well read." - Tom Deveson, Sunday Times
  
  
• "If it is a novel, it's a very bad one (.....) In short, it's a rambling and highly egocentric work of criticism, about a bunch of unconnected writers whom Thirlwell happens to have read, and with whom he wants to associate himself. Practised readers will have no difficulty in diagnosing the usual source of silliness of this sort, and in fact Thirlwell not only lives in Oxford, but is a fellow of All Souls. (...) The sad impression that this book gives is that he started it wanting to be George Steiner. Very soon, he revised his ambitions, and wanted to be Alain de Botton. Neither of those should be the ambition of a grown man." - Philip Hensher, The Telegraph
  
  
• "Confused ? I am. I sat down to read Miss Herbert enthusiastically. And then I sat down again. And again. And each time the long-winded sentences bogged me down, leaving me wondering whether I was simply not up to the intellectual challenge or whether the book was unnecessarily confusing. The idea is gimmicky. (...) There is a wealth of interesting information in this book. It could be a companion to Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read ; a guide to authors' lives and a brief introduction to literary criticism. Had it been edited down, it would have been more likely to sustain the reader's attention. Instead the lengthy word count gives room for the downfalls of the book (.....) Thirlwell begins to read like the intellectual equivalent of a precocious American beauty pageant contestant. (...) The book is not a failure, but neither is it a compelling read for anyone other than the most determined and knowledge-hungry reader." - Sarah Birke, The Time
  
  
• "The problem is rather the critical-fictional content. Thirlwell promises a book of cod-antiquarian curiosities, of metafictinal labyrinths in which compelling ideas are canvassed regarding the history of the novel, and his somewhat archly fuddled author's persona carries the whole thing off with a light touch. But then he delivers, at great and tedious length, a depressingly conventional disquisition on style and the problem of translation. (...) Despite its failings, there is an ambitious, stylish, intellectually vagrant book here, not so much fighting to get out as struggling to get in, from the margins." - Brian Dillon, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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Links:

• Jonathan Cape publicity page
• Profile in The Scotsman

• Asylum
• Financial Times
• The Guardian
• Independent on Sunday
• Metro
• New Statesman
• The Observer
• PopMatters
• The Spectator
• Sunday Times
• The Telegraph
• The Times

• Adam Thirlwell at Contemporary Writers
• Article in The Guardian
• Profile in The Moscow Times
• Brief biography as one of the Granta BYBNs 2003
• 'The Cyrillic Alphabet' by Thirlwell, in Granta

• Politics

• Flaubert's Madame Bovary
• See Index of Literary Essays
• See Index of books dealing with Translation
• See Index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review

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About the Author:

       British author Adam Thirlwell was born in 1978.

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© 2007-2008 the complete review

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