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how proust can change your life
BY DAVID FUTRELLE marcel proust would seem an unlikely role model, to say the least. His life was, generally speaking, miserable. He had asthma; he had a severely troubled stomach; his skin was so sensitive he couldn't use soap; he was terrified of heights, of mice, of travel, of too-loose underpants; noise from neighbors drove him nearly mad. He spent his life as a perpetual invalid, passing through a succession of colds and fevers, never breaking away from his clinging mother, with whom he lived until she died. His love life, such as it was, consisted of a series of unrequited crushes on unsuitable men. "Without pleasures, objectives, activities or ambitions, with the life ahead of me finished and with an awareness of the grief I cause my parents, I have little happiness," he wrote when he was 30. After completing all seven volumes of "Remembrance of Things Past," the anxious hypochondriac developed pneumonia and died at the age of 51. And this is the man from whom we're expected to take life lessons? Well, lessons of a sort. Alain de Botton does in fact attempt to explain "How Proust Can Change Your Life." His engaging new book -- not quite self-help, not quite literary criticism -- explores how a careful reading of Proust can help us to solve such problems as "how to be a good friend," "how to be happy in love" and "how to suffer successfully." For no matter how miserable Proust made himself, he was always a keen and insightful observer of others. "Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyze processes which we would otherwise know nothing about," he wrote. Spoken like a true hypochondriac. But even in those areas of life in which he did not exactly excel -- love, for example -- Proust was able to accumulate considerable knowledge, which de Botton draws forth with cleverness and wit from the novelist's various writings, public and private. Proust wrote with scorn of those who spoke only in clichés, in part because he knew how easy it was for stock phrases to substitute for real emotions. An effusive and perhaps overdevoted friend to many people, he recognized that a sort of amiable insincerity is necessary for friendship -- and that it's often worth the effort it takes to bite one's tongue.
De Botton's book may not, literally, change anyone's life, but it may prompt a few of its readers to have another go at Proust. Since it's likely more people have watched Monty Python's "All-England Summarize Proust" competition than have actually finished even one of the volumes of his sprawling, digressive novel, this in itself is something of an accomplishment.
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