Marcel Proust’s Within a Budding Grove is encyclopedic in its analytic approach, extraordinary in a pictorial sense and superb in characterizations, but there are times when Proust is too Proustian, too insistent on turning psychological studies into philosophical conclusions and too self-indulgent in forcing relationships upon the reader that he himself ends up dismissing as insubstantial as well as ill-fated. And then there is the curious way in which Proust undermines his own massively constructed characters. Marcel is an adolescent boy in Part I of this novel; in Part II, when he is supposedly past adolescence, he remains something of […]