In 1937 Vladimir Nabokov described the perfect novel during a lecture in Paris which he delivered to an audience including, rather Nabokovianly, the Hungarian football team:
What an exciting experience it would be to follow the adventures of an idea through the ages. With no wordplay intended, I daresay this would be the ideal novel: we would really see the abstract image, perfectly limpid and unencumbered by humanity’s dust.
Miss Herbert, Adam Thirlwell tells us, is an attempt at Nabokov’s ideal novel — ‘which is not really a novel’. It is a book about novelists and their work, in which we are given themes, motifs and a fairly large caveat: ‘It just has no plot, no fiction, and no finale.’
So what is it, exactly? You could say it was a book of clever-informal criticism, which firstly argues that, over time, avant-garde writers have achieved a greater truth than straightforward realists, and which secondly asks whether style can be translated.
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