A yarn about yarn-spinners

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. Therefore, you might file this on the criticism shelf — between Albert Thibaudet and Anthony Thwaite — and stop worrying.

But that wouldn’t do. Annoyingly, you cannot deny that Miss Herbert, despite having no characters or plot, and despite not being fictional (at least until Thirlwell translates a Nabokov short story at the end), has an almost indefinably novelistic whiff which stops it from being pure criticism. Although its content is factual, its flow is like that of experimental fiction — only here the asides, rewinds and fast-forwards are all about literature. Therefore it must come off the criticism shelf, and perhaps remain undefined.

The woman of the title was Juliet Herbert, governess to Flaubert’s niece. She taught Flaubert English by helping him translate Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ into French, and then by helping him translate Madame Bovary into English.