Reading "In Search of Lost Time"

M. also explores ideas of love by spying upon the homosexual encounters of many of his male friends and discovering what he soon realizes is a broad and deep underground of ruling-class homosexual connections partially concealed by wealth, marriage, costume, parties and politics. If "In Search of Lost Time" is undeniably about everything that passes through the consciousness of M., one of those things is sex -- what he feels about it, how he gets it, who else seems to be getting it, what it means to individuals and to social networks, whether it is worth it, what is more interesting and less interesting, and what it makes people do that they otherwise might not do. He seems to agree with the opinion that the Marquis de Sade expresses in the 18th century novel "Justine," that woman are for making economic, social and familial liasons; what men really want is to be buggered, or whipped, by the lower orders.

But, as I say, M. is a narrator of great charm. By the time you get to his "homosexual agenda," many days into your reading of the novel, it will not seem that he is trying to persuade you of anything, only that he is reporting what he sees and thinks and that his greatest desire is to report faithfully and truthfully. As with all novels, you may take it or leave it. Only those who take other people's private sexual choices as personally threatening (and he portrays those types of boors from time to time, the blind, narcissistic and truly self-centered who don't have the capacity to hear or appreciate the nuances of the "strange and individual tone of voice" that is the pleasure and fascination of great literature) might want to quit reading at this point.

It is important that you go about your business while you pursue your reading project. You have to take M. with you on planes and trains and into hotels and to the dentist's office and into your child's piano lesson. "In Search of Lost Time" will not have its full effect if you sequester it. It must diffuse into your life, color every place you go and every scene you look at with its own tints. When you lift your eyes to glance into your own backyard, you want to do so with the sight of Albertine in your mind, quiet in her own chamber, forbidden to awaken M. too early in the morning; or the sight of M.'s friend, Saint-loup, stepping athletically over the backs of banquettes in a mirrored restaurant in Paris, making his way to M., who is sitting eating his supper; or the sight of Madame de Guermantes in one of her elegant turn-of-the-century Fortuny costumes and her red shoes. You want to listen to M.'s quiet voice in your head even while the news is on or while the dog is barking at the arrival of the UPS man. Seventy days in a row to spend with one narrative sensibility is a long time, but after you are finished, it will seem as though you were with him for years and are with him still.

Biographies of Marcel Proust make him out to be an odd man, who lived in a cork-lined room and worked by night for most of the latter part of his life, but M., his narrator, goes on so eloquently and at such length that it ceases after a while to be tempting to diagnose him. He almost pronounces his own diagnosis at the very beginning, right after his mother stays with him for that one night -- if she had stayed away, if they had disciplined him, maybe the twin indulgences of love and literature would not have come to have such a power over him. In the course of his seven volumes, M. hints at efforts the family made, and he made, too, to render him more productive and employable. He goes for cures. He takes too much care of himself. He nearly goes bankrupt buying things for Albertine. He knows he is, and in some sense has always been, a disappointment to his parents. But M.'s sensibility is so fine and so unfiltered that diagnosing him is forgotten in favor of observing him as he observes himself observing everyone around him. His sense of discrimination is robust; his eye is keen; his literary being is abundance itself. He is a man too busy to mourn because he must re-create what is no longer.

• View blog reactions