Precocious protégé of Craig Raine is savaged amusingly in Philip Hensher’s review of MISS HERBERT:
Criticism cum sort-of fiction – Telegraph

He is addicted to the one-sentence paragraph beginning with a preposition. Perhaps he thinks this adds a Flaubertian tone to the proceedings. The problem is that in English, it doesn’t sound like Flaubert. It sounds like Tony Parsons in the Daily Mirror.

and

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.

Ouch.

And from the New Statesman review by Toby Lichtig, we get the following statement of intent from Thirlwell:

New Statesman – Critical failures

“my version of Nabokov’s ideal novel – which is not really a novel. It has recurring characters; with a theme, and variations . . . It just has no plot, no fiction, and no finale.”

In the end, Lichtig accuses Thirlwell of hubris:

Jim Dixon deems his own paper “worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance”. This is Thirlwell’s real crime: though Miss Herbert draws intelligently on a range of sources and its author is perspicacious and admirably well-read, he remains overweeningly certain of his own originality. Through the narrative shield of Politics, Thirlwell just about got away with it; but Miss Herbert isn’t a novel – and here he does not.