The title of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's new novel, "In Search of Love and Beauty" … evokes that of Proust's great opus concerning the search for lost time, and much else about the novel is Proustian: its aristocratic milieu, where there is always enough money to finance romance; its multi-generational scope; its free movements back and forth in time; its frequent scenes of sexual spying; its interest in Jewishness and homosexuality as modes of estrangement; and its insistent moral that human love will always find an unworthy object…. [However, there is] one respect wherein this novel does not resemble Proust—a certain hurried flatness of the prose; the authorial voice assumes a tone of gossip and summation before the characters have earned our interest and, briskly racing around the ambitious territory staked out, does not always provide the specificity of which this fine writer is capable. In Proust's interweave of romantic delusions, the glory of the descriptions, as the narrator strives to recapture the past, redeems everyone, even characters as tawdry as Jupien and Morel; in "In Search of Love and Beauty" no one is redeemed.
Yet the novel contains a world of knowing and many vivid scenes that in sum give a colorful picture of what America meant to the upper-class Germans who immigrated here during the thirties, and what they made of it. Like the Russians who came to Berlin a decade before, they retained as much of their social and actual furniture as possible…. Louise's chic friend Regi … has a Park Avenue apartment "done up in the Bauhaus style she had brought with her as absolutely the latest thing," with glass-and-chrome furniture and white wolf rugs…. To cater to the German refugee community, a posh restaurant called the Old Vienna opens … and here at the center row of tables Louise and Regi, in girlhood called The Inseparables and now, like the century, in their thirties, make a splendid impression, [flamboyantly dressed in expensive clothes]…. (pp. 85-6)
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