“I’d read through the whole thing twice, and I used to go on and on: Marcel, the spectacular writer, my idol, and so forth. I used to blather endlessly about why I adored him, how he, the desperate socialite and party hopper, the inveterate pleaser, was actually the outsider par excellence, how he could be amid all the people he’d always dreamed of befriending yet remain alone in the universe, the loneliest speck of all.”