Marcel Proust as self-help maven? Alain de Botton's often amusing new book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, is indeed full of chapters with headings like “How to Suffer Successfully” and “How to Express Your Emotions.” He contends that the great modern novelist was at heart one of the earliest proponents of the self-improvement mania. In de Botton's view, the multivolume masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (as he accurately translates its title) is not “a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age”; it is “a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting time and start to appreciate life.”

The novelist's father, Dr. Adrien Proust, was a specialist in the field of public health whose work went far toward eradicating cholera and bubonic plague in France. He also wrote guides to physical fitness, making him “a pioneer and master of the keep-fit self-help manual.” His son admired his achievements extravagantly. “Ah,” he said to his maid, “if I could be sure of doing with my books as much as my father did for the sick.”

De Botton's premise is a clever one, allowing him to sneak a rather slight literary study onto the most prominent display tables in the bookshops with the backing of a mainstream publishing house. It may seem to make the book a one-joke story, easily put down after flipping through a chapter or two. But in fact it expands naturally into the more serious theme that a great work, properly read, will offer invaluable insights. Or, as Proust expressed it: “Every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps have never experienced in himself.”

At first glance Proust might not appear to be the ideal guide for those seeking health and happiness. An invalid, he suffered from severe asthma, inexplicable allergies, poor digestion, dizziness, and chest pain. He seldom arose before evening, and wrote all of In Search of Lost Time—a task that took him 14 years—in bed. He was accused of being a hypochondriac, but his death from pneumonia at the age of 51 lends credence to his self-description: “suspended between caffeine, aspirin, asthma, angina pectoris, and, altogether between life and death every six days out of seven.”

Proust's love life, too, was far from satisfactory. Gradually realizing that the young women his mother produced for his inspection would never interest him, he accepted his homosexuality. But he was not ever to enjoy what modern self-help writers would call a “fulfilling relationship,” except for a very brief period with a taxi driver who died in an air crash. “Love is an incurable disease,” he wrote. “Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.” It is an opinion unforgettably illustrated in his fiction.

In the Proustian scheme to feel is, to a large extent, to suffer. How then can we suffer successfully, to use de Botton's catchy phrase? Well, we must learn something from our pain—learn, at the very least, that it is useless and possibly meaningless. Here, for instance, is Proust on jealousy: “It is one of the powers of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the emotions of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions. We imagine that we know exactly what things are and people think, for the simple reason that we do not care about them. But as soon as we have a desire to know, as the jealous man has, then it becomes a kaleidoscope in which we can no longer distinguish anything.”

Friendship, unlike romance, was something Proust excelled at. His countless friends attested to his affectionate nature, his generosity, his invariable tact and kindness. Yet he was no warmer in his appraisal of friendship than of love, characterizing it as “a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone.” And he cautioned in his writing: “The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive).”

While those might sound like the words of a hopelessly depressed and misanthropic person, Proust was not one to sink into a despair or throw himself off a bridge. His way of coping was cheerfully pragmatic; he decided that friendship, however unsatisfactory, was nevertheless important and he devoted considerable time and effort to its cultivation. His success was perhaps due to the fact that he entertained no unrealistic expectations; since he did not expect to find a soul mate, he could satisfy himself with simple affection. “I do my intellectual work within myself,” he wrote, “and once with other people, it's more or less irrelevant to me that they're intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.”

Proust so showered his friends with flattery that they invented a verb, “to Proustify,” meaning to show a flowery, verbose geniality. He made it a rule to refrain wholly from unkind comment, and thought the pursuit of affection incompatible with the pursuit of truth. How different from our modern self-help gurus, who claim that honesty between friends is of paramount importance. Taking his cue from his hero, de Botton observes that “though the dominant view of grievances is that they should invariably be discussed with their progenitors, the typically unsatisfactory results of doing so should perhaps urge us to reconsider.” How true; just think of the friendships you've known yourself that have foundered upon an excess of “honesty.”

The imperatives of friendship and of art, of course, are not at all the same. Proust described artists as “creatures who talk of precisely the things one shouldn't mention.” De Botton suggests, in turn, that we look at In Search of Lost Time as “an unusually long unsent letter, the antidote to a lifetime of Proustification … the place where the unsayable was finally granted expression.”

Still, Proust's art has a good deal to teach us not only about personal relations but about that rarest of talents, the simple enjoyment of life. He advised that we pay close attention to the great painters who open our eyes to the world, and singled out for especial praise the work of Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, pointing to “the charm and wisdom with which it coats our most modest moments by initiating us into the life of still life.”

Chardin chose to give the ordinary and the homely meaning, just as Proust himself did in writing about the village of Illiers, where he spent summers as a boy. Specific objects, or people, or existence itself is never trivial; what is trivial is the quality of our memories of these things. “We don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it,” Proust wrote, “but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and similarly we think we no longer love the dead, because we don't remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.”

The glove, the smell inspire not so much recollection as appreciation. Works of art, including books, are also valuable insofar as they provide opportunities for appreciation. Otherwise, Proust stressed, their virtue is dubious: “As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place. …”

The art, then, lies not in an artist's experiences but in the quality of his perceptions and his ability to convey them. De Botton illustrates this truth by recounting his visit to Illiers (fictionalized as Combray, it is now officially Illiers-Combray in honor of the novel). Arriving full of eager anticipation, he finds, not the timeless beauty of Proust's evocation, but a dull. dusty little town; the rooms of his Tante Leonie's house, where de Botton takes a guided tour, “re-create in its full esthetic horror the feel of a tastelessly furnished, provincial bourgeois 19th century home.” As Proust said of the landscapes painted by Millet and Monet, the beauty is not in the scenes themselves. it is in the mind and eye of the artist.

While ostensibly this book concerns Proust's lessons on life. ultimately it probably reveals more about what he has to tell us regarding art. Be that as it may, even de Botton's smart, sometimes annoying, postmodern irony cannot obscure a sincere affection for his subject that few readers will fail to share. Who, after all, could resist a man who called his maid “Plouplou” and urged her to call him “Missou”? How Proust Can Change Your Life performs a valuable service in reminding us of the manifold allurements of a “great modernist” too often considered heavy and daunting.