This is not the first time Juliet Herbert has appeared in a novel. In Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (and in real life) Flaubert employed her as his niece’s governess and admired her breasts. Now, however, as the translator of a lost version of Madame Bovary, she becomes the pretext for Adam Thirlwell to advance his speculations about the nature of fiction itself, to intermingle writers and imaginary characters (so that Gogol and Gombrowicz rub sleeves with Eugene Onegin and Anna Livia Plurabelle), and to offer us gobbets in 10 languages, mini-essays, maps, portraits, photographs, obiter dicta, dates, indexes, footnotes, a variety of typefaces and 10 squiggles.

Thirlwell is a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, as well as the author of a previous novel, Politics, which featured a north London ménage à trois. This time, there is no oral or anal sex, but the 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. Tolstoy “is a miniaturist”, a descendant of the “economical” Sterne.

The reader frequently responds to Thirlwell’s broader assertions with “Yes, but” or (more often) “Yes, and?” So, Nabokov said that Don Quixote treats things as funny which now seem savage? Yes, Orwell made the same point and he took it from Nietzsche. Saint-Simon helped Saul Bellow to find a voice? Yes, but so did Mark Twain. It is the same with countless smaller details. Thirlwell argues that Kafka’s effects are “cumulations of small things”, but he ignores the double meanings in the title of Der Prozess – the word indeed means “trial”, but it also has associations suggesting “procedure” and “entanglement”, as if the very language in which we try to understand the book helps to defeat our purpose. We get an interesting discussion of the connotations of the name Akaky Akakievich (the central figure in Gogol’s story The Overcoat), but nothing about how the idiom of the narrator is itself deliberately full of partiality, digression, illogic and confusing shifts of tone.

Thirlwell is fond of making ingratiating asides to the reader. There is Xavier de Maistre’s description of a pink and white bedspread, “which I like so much”. There are Saul Steinberg’s drawings of dogs – “I like these dogs very much”. As for Italo Svevo, James Joyce’s polyglot friend, “I like Svevo so much.”

Thirlwell compares himself to Proust, declares that he is “going to take over” from Tristram Shandy, generously allows that “Joyce was right” and that “sometimes I agree with Eugenio Montale”. Such proprietorial presumption is perhaps meant to be comic but sounds ominously owlish.

At one point, we are told that the rhymes in Eugene Onegin “are not a side of fries. They are part of the Big Mac”. Elsewhere, there’s the remark that Hrabal’s narrators “are marked by their . . .ontological marginality”. We hear about “the grand French critic Paul Valéry”, “the Russian novelist and poet Alexander Pushkin” and “the famously stylish poet Stéphane Mallarmé”. 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.

MISS HERBERT by Adam Thirlwell
Cape £25 pp592

Times Recommends

• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict
• Literary festivals: a survivor’s guide