John Sturrock
HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE by Alain de Botton (Picador, R126)
THE montage on the jacket of this slim volume is ominous: why should the gloomy Marcel Proust pictured there have a lurid bird clawing at his shoulder? Is it perhaps a parrot, echoing the unfortunate claim in the blurb that How Proust Can Change Your Life will do for this French author what Julian Barnes’s book Flaubert’s Parrot so beautifully did for an earlier one? Or is it a goldfinch, the nickname which Proust gave to a contemporary hack writer whom he thought wrote pretentiously?
Whatever sort of bird it is, its presence on the jacket suggests that the feathers of nesting Proustians such as myself are sure to be ruffled by what lies within. But hardly: the coltish Alain de Botton is so obviously out to charm that the last thing on his bright young mind is the ruffling of feathers.
How Proust Can Change Your Life is a chatty small book in which his own worldly wisdom is displayed in easy association with that of the most alarmingly worldly novelist who ever lived, and in which Proust’s huge and extraordinary novel is brought faux-naively within general reach as “a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting and begin appreciating one’s life”.
What this amounts to in practice is a succession of “How to” chapters: “How to Love Life Today”, “How to Suffer Successfully”, and so on, gathered partly from what Proust has to say or show in In Search of Lost Time, partly from scraps of the novelist’s biography and partly from what De Botton coyly refers to as his own “romantic antics”. The idea is to demonstrate how much more aware and hence better people we would be were we to read Proust with this same view to self- improvement.
Reading In Search of Lost Time is a wonderful experience but not one that is likely to do you the sort of good De Botton envisages. Proust’s novel is not a nice book, nor was he exactly a nice man. Both novel and novelist are more troubling and ambiguous sources of human understanding than you would guess from skimming across their surfaces in De Botton’s undemanding company.
Indeed, if Proust were ever going to change the lives of those who read him, it could only be in the direction of an incurable misanthropy, so cruelly exact is he when it comes to providing the secret, malevolent reasons that even – or especially – the most civilised people harbour when acting as they do. This of course is the familiar stuff of comedy, and Proust is frequently a comic writer; but he is just as frequently viperish in laying bare the polluted springs of human relations.
De Botton has chosen to hush this dark side of Proust up. Where, for example, is the chapter that there should have been here on “How to Turn Jealousy to Advantage”?
The one chapter in How Proust Can Change Your Life in which De Botton has put himself out is the one that deals with the question of friendship, and with the remarkable coexistence within Proust of the caustic and unforgiving moralist and the inveterate fawner on titled women. Here De Botton has it right: his novel is where he executed his revenge, not simply on the mindless blue-bloods he had courted, but on himself as their flatterer.
There are few pages of De Botton’s book where a three-dimensional Proust comes into view. Would that he had been present throughout.
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