SOURCE: Robb, Graham. “Marcel the Moralist.” Times Literary Supplement (25 April 1997): 36.

In the following review, Robb discusses How Proust Can Change Your Life and the purported intent of such chapters as “How to Be a Good Friend” and “How to Suffer Successfully.”

What does a man who spent fourteen miserable years in bed have to teach us about happiness? What life-enhancing precepts can we hope to extract from the works of a mouse-fearing, hot-water-bottle-clutching Mummy's boy who was tormented by indigestion, constipation, a neurotic need for tight underpants and a chronic suspicion of doctors?

Alain de Botton's patchwork portrait [in How Proust Can Change Your Life] makes Proust sound like a Job in the hands of an unusually inventive Satan: he hated the cold and central heating, suffered from altitude sickness after a trip to Versailles, and was so acutely aware of neighbours' noise that he almost died from...