Marcel Proust

January 4, 1999
In this quietly brilliant contribution to the Penguin Lives series (see review of Crazy Horse, p. 58), White has resuscitated the art of biographical appreciation--a form favored by the first generation of writers who could be considered to exemplify a gay sensibility (Walter Pater, Henry James, Edmund Gosse)--and brought it out of the closet. He follows Proust's evolution from social-climbing dilettante to dedicated artist, placing him in the social milieus of high-society Paris and turn-of-the-century arts and letters. As in his acclaimed full-length biography of Jean Genet, White uses the life of his subject to examine the modern history of homosexuality, and he does so with the same combination of earthiness and worldliness that has marked his essays and autobiographical fiction since the 1970s. By now Proust is perhaps the least mysterious of writers, blessed with several good biographies and many excellent studies (helpfully noted in White's bibliography); but while White claims that his work owes "everything" to the most recent of Proust's biographers, Jean-Yves Tadie, no one can match White's sensibility or his sympathy for the subject. His criticisms of Proust's work are consistently trenchant and insightful, and he brings to Proust's life the earned, respectful familiarity of a distinguished acolyte. Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life marked a revival of popular interest in Remembrance of Things Past; White's small marvel of economy and organization should supersede de Botton's book as a handy introduction to one of the century's greatest novelists.

Starred review from January 1, 1999
White's portrait of Marcel Proust (1871-1922) heralds the debut (along with Larry McMurtry's Crazy Horse, LJ 11/15/98) of Penguin's new series of biographies edited by James Atlas. White, author of Genet: A Biography (LJ 1/94), attributes the recent fascination with Proust to the current popularity of the memoir. Proust, White says, is the master of all memoirists; one who, in Remembrance of Things Past, is able to capture the richness of the past through language, characterization, and the realization that "memories come flooding back to us in their full, sensuous force only when triggered involuntarily by tastes or smells or other sensations over which we have no control." Although he achieved fame in his lifetime and was considered a great wit in Parisian literary circles, Proust struggled continuously with his homosexuality and poor health. White's simple and elegantly written biography weaves literary criticism with respectful insight, and will appeal to general readers as well as scholars. Highly recommended.--Diane G. Premo, Rochester P.L., NY

December 1, 1998
Set this slender biography next to Proust's voluminous "Remembrance of Things Past," and marvel at how White compresses so much genius in so few pages. White's brevity reflects his remarkable confidence in locating the psychological tensions that perplexed Proust in life and the imaginative impulses that liberated him in art. Exploring an oft-ignored topic, White plumbs the motivations of a man desperate to hide his homosexuality from society and inclined to depict its practice as an ugly perversion in his fiction. With similar sophistication, White probes the reasons the son of a Jewish mother kept anti-Semites as friends and caricatured Jews as loathsome beasts in his work--yet still sided with the liberals in the Dreyfus affair. But White invests his best efforts in clarifying how Proust's rare susceptibility to spontaneous memories opened up a marvelous new world of literature and created an enduring masterpiece in fiction. So long as that masterpiece attracts readers, so too will this perceptive biography. ((Reviewed December 1, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)