Cynthia Crossen finds Literary Self-Help in Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life:
Obviously, I am in a tiny minority of Americans who find more relief from life’s travails in Gustav Flaubert, Edith Wharton and George Orwell than Wayne Dyer, Rick Warren and Dr. Phil. But I couldn’t have explained my habit of turning to old-fashioned, long-dead novelists for comfort and counsel until I read Mr. de Botton’s 1997 encomium to Marcel Proust written in the form of a self-help manual. It turns out that In Search of Lost Time (Or Remembrance of Things Past, as the title is often translated), published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, addresses such eternal — if self-centered — lamentations as, “Why do I suffer?” and “How should I express my emotions?” and “Why can’t I be happy in love?”I knew nothing of Proust’s personal life before reading How Proust Can Change Your Life. In many ways, the man was a mess. When he wasn’t physically ill — and he usually was — Proust was a snobbish insomniac and hypochondriac who couldn’t abide fresh air or sunlight. His love for men was mostly unrequited. His relationship with his mother was infantile well into his adulthood. “While it is clear why someone might be interested in developing a Proustian approach to life,” Mr. de Botton comments, “the sane would never harbor a desire to lead a life like Proust’s.”
Yet with his almost supernatural sensitivity to human relationships (as well as ordinary objects like biscuits called madeleines), Proust explained in poetic detail how and why people behave as they do, and, Mr. de Botton demonstrates, how they might feel and behave better. “Far from a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, In Search of Lost Time is a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting time and start to appreciate life.”
Unfortunately for the typically overscheduled citizen of the modern world, Proust needed 3,000 pages to do the job that ordinary self-help writers do in a few hundred. Proust’s own brother Robert bemoaned the “sad thing” that “people have to be very ill or have broken a leg” to read In Search of Lost Time.” An esteemed Parisian publisher confessed to a friend, “I may be dense, but I fail to see why a chap needs 30 pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.” Proust ended up using his own money to publish the books.
For those of us without lingering illnesses or brittle bones, Mr. de Botton, with humor and cunning, distills Proust’s insights into 197 pages without reducing them to so many fortune cookies.