This has been a good year for Proust, for seasoned Proustians as well as aspiring readers of his masterwork, A la recherche du temps perdu. We have two new biographies, not including Jean-Yves Tadié’s superb Marcel Proust: A Life, hailed in France in 1996 and recently published here in English, and we have Roger Shattuck’s Proust’s Way, condensing into a portable volume the professor’s useful ideas from his earlier critical works.¹

All this Proustiana has brought a flood of daily reviews and commentary, amusing in what it scarcely conceals: how few people have actually read the novel. Our journalists are increasingly inclined, or seem obliged, to call A la recherche the greatest novel of the twentieth century, taking their cue perhaps from Graham Greene’s comment that “Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.”

Our journalists are increasingly inclined, or seem obliged, to call A la recherche the greatest novel of the twentieth century.

But the consensus is mystical, mired in longing and embarrassed ignorance. I was happier when they were calling Ulyssesthe greatest, though I prefer Proust to Joyce, because that sounded more sincere. I do not know personally ten people who have read Proust’s novel whole, and yet the work cannot really be appreciated any other way. Like a cathedral, it must be seen from all points of the compass, and from inside