SOURCE: Allen, Brooke. “The Power of Positive Proust.” The New Leader 80, no. 15 (22 September 1997): 15-16.

In the following review, Allen argues that although How Proust Can Change Your Life might initially strike readers as a superficial, one-joke story, it is a serious, complex work that offers useful insights.

Marcel Proust as self-help maven? Alain de Botton's often amusing new book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, is indeed full of chapters with headings like “How to Suffer Successfully” and “How to Express Your Emotions.” He contends that the great modern novelist was at heart one of the earliest proponents of the self-improvement mania. In de Botton's view, the multivolume masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (as he accurately translates its title) is not “a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age”; it is “a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting time and start to...