Bob Dylan went electric, and the crowd booed. But now we know better — acoustic folk music could never have expressed the psychedelic colors about to sprout from Mr. Dylan’s head. We receive a similar thrill, of righteous innovation, from many of our most prized literary anecdotes: when Bellow dropped existentialism and wrote “The Adventures of Augie March,” for instance. It’s a universal pattern: Playfulness triumphs and the artist grins.

These are stories we tell ourselves in reveries of historical conceit, when the one true path seems to stretch behind us, leading, in the case of literature, back through Joyce and Kafka straight to Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy.” Experiment is easy to celebrate once it’s been canonized.

And it’s a worthwhile celebration, though it grows tiresome in the of Adam Thirlwell’s “The Delighted States” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 506 pages, $30). Mr. Thirlwell, a young English writer, has previously written one novel, “Politics,” and his new book, too, claims to be a novel of sorts — in which its characters are in fact famous authors. But for all purposes, it is a history of the novel, albeit an unconventional one.

“The Delighted States” is founded on the liberating observation that although translation is always imperfect, it frequently is good enough. Great authors have read each other in translations, and productively. As a corollary, suggests Mr. Thirlwell, who admits to only “fluent English, quixotic French, and hobbyhorsical Russian,” he can confidently write about all of them, and in the course of his book he organizes a glowing constellation of great names.

He makes his argument by way of anecdote, beginning with Flaubert, whose formative trip to Egypt illustrates the subtle thesis of “The Delighted States,” that healthy experience begets irony, that worldliness is the natural successor to romanticism. His book is not merely a celebration of translation, warts and all, then, but also of the warts-and-all worldview.

Mr. Thirlwell loves to signpost, and to advertise his authorial freedom: “But on this occasion, I am going to disagree with Tolstoy, and Nabokov,” he writes, counterintuitively claiming “War and Peace” for his tradition of ironic, experimental novels. He believes, too, that errors of translation can actually be productive. “‘The Delighted States,’ let’s remember, is written with a full acceptance of the mistake, the anachronism, the side effect,” he writes.

The problems and opportunities of translation open onto related questions of style. Is style more than the sentence? Is it not the author’s worldview itself? And can’t that be translated? Sure, says the reader, and “The Delighted States” begins with an air of common sense and a gracious will to entertain. Its anecdotes are mostly fresh — did you know that one of the French translators of “Ulysses” advised another one that Molly Bloom had the vocabulary of Mallarmé, “alive and plastic, vulgar but not to the point of excluding literary words”? That Sterne personally presented his books to Diderot? That Hrabal wrote his first book on a German typewriter, sans Czech accents, and published it that way?

As a short book, “The Delighted States” would have been adroit and delightful, but it seems to need its size. It wants to be marvelous, a cabinet of curiosities and a canon at once. But the pattern of Mr. Thirlwell’s mini-chapters becomes too familiar: A convenient snippet of an author’s work is introduced, a few good twists of interpretation are applied, the commentary of another author — the more incongruous the better, like Joyce on Tolstoy — is brought to bear, and then Mr. Thirlwell trots out another of what he might happily call his hobbyhorses, in homage to Sterne. What begins as a fresh approach to the problem of translation becomes, once linguistic barriers have been knocked down, merely a roundup of Mr. Thirlwell’s all-time favorite authors.

The upshot is an anti-Romantic canon. “The novel is not romantic; it does not allow the novelist lyrically to express himself … The novel is an art of comedy, and relativity,” writes Mr. Thirlwell, sweepingly. Yet his advocacy of these authors — his “characters” — sometimes verges on the sentimental. “But according to the logic of ‘The Delighted States,’ no story is really sad,” he writes.

Mr. Thirlwell’s mini-chapters throw his characters and key ideas together like a tilt-a-whirl, such that all his authors blur together. Flaubert, Chekhov, Kafka — Mr. Thirwell’s ideal author is light-hearted, a formalist and an ironist both. He is a cosmopolitan triumphant, like Bellow the comic or Dylan the rock star; he is our iconic portrait of Einstein, sticking out his tongue.

Though familiar, this portrait is compelling enough, and “The Delighted States” succeeds until it invites the reader to quarrel with it — by disposing of James or Beckett in an aside, by glossing Tolstoy in an overly convenient way, or by simply annoying us with its unconventional, talky narration.

But the best criticism drops us down into a text, and shows us how it works or why it is unique. Despite its length, “The Delighted States” does this only occasionally and briefly. It purports to prize detail, but every chapter moves swiftly toward abstraction; it is perhaps a book to be read at paced intervals, like a literary calendar. And yet, for its problems, Mr. Thirlwell’s book remains an enormous trove, a resource that is often provocative and occasionally brilliant. The author’s gifts are as obvious as his ambition — and the two may well resolve more convincingly in the future.

blytal@nysun.com