Complete review at the following URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/12/AR2008061203566.html

Michael Dirda on 'The Delighted States'

Literary criticism as showy acrobatics.

By Michael Dirda

Sunday, June 15, 2008; Page BW10

THE DELIGHTED STATES

A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes

By Adam Thirlwell

Farrar Straus Giroux. 505 pp. $30

Adam Thirlwell -- a young British writer and author of a well-received novel called Politics -- may have written the most dazzlingly tedious book of the summer. Its lengthy subtitle, which harks back to those found in 18th-century tracts, vaguely suggests a kind of Shandean literary romp, though without ever quite saying what the book is about. In fact, the more than 500 pages of The Delighted States make up an extended meditation, with abundant quotation, on style in fiction, with particular attention to the nature of translation. Its chief examples are the usual masters of innovative narrative: Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov and Bellow, along with the nearly as eminent, if not so well known, Machado de Assis, Italo Svevo, Bruno Schulz, Bohumil Hrabal, Witold Gombrowicz and Georges Perec.

[ ... ]

Strangely enough, given his subject matter, Thirlwell's own prose is distinctly bland, despite its overbright talkiness. For instance, Thirlwell likes to build an argument or assert a point, then suddenly contradict himself (though oddly enough he deprecates Dostoevsky, whose Underground Man is the master of this technique). Worst of all, though, Thirlwell often comes across as twerpily arrogant. You can almost hear the "nyah, nyah" raspberry in remarks like these: "Unfortunately for Bellow, he had not read André Gide. Or if he had, he hadn't understood." "And this technique was noted a century later by Vladimir Nabokov, who did not notice the same thing in War and Peace." Sigh. Good thing there's a really sharp mind around who can set us straight.

[ ... ]

Appended to The Delighted States, for no compelling reason that I can see, is Thirlwell's translation of Nabokov's original French version of "Mademoiselle O," later reworked by the novelist into a chapter of his memoir Speak, Memory. No doubt one should view this new Englishing of "Mademoiselle O" as some kind of example or test case, but of what I'm not entirely sure. That it's printed upside down, with its own title page, seems egregiously cutesy. I'm also puzzled as to why the title page of Maupassant's Mont-Oriol appears in the index, since that book isn't discussed anywhere in the text.

Normally, I would eagerly applaud a young writer's enterprising attempt to recreate the critical essay, to spin out a set of variations on a theme in the history of fiction. But to bring off the loosey-goosey manner of a book like The Delighted States requires more than a few appealing literary anecdotes: It needs considerable authorial charm, and this Thirlwell lacks. Instead, he proffers many thoughtful, if hardly soul-stirring, analyses of passages from classic authors and a slew of sloganizing generalizations, such as this gnomic description of Kafka's writing: "It is adagio, and massive, and very short." Well, Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States is flashy, and pompous, and very long. Nobody likes a showoff. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com. This is his last review for the summer, though his weekly book discussions will continue at washingtonpost.com on Wednesdays at 2 p.m. He will return to Book World at the end of August.

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