Word: proustian
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Since the publication of his first novel, Forgetting Elena, in 1973, White's Proustian prose style caught, if not the public eye at first, the eyes of the masters: Vladimir Nabokov (White's literary hero) praised his first novel, and Gore Vidal hailed his second, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978). A book of nonfiction titled States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980) enjoyed encomiums from Christopher Isherwood. In reviewing A Boy's Own Story (1982), the New York Times said, "Edmund White has crossed . . . J.D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde to create an extraordinary novel...
...autobiographical minutiae, his willingness to spin elaborate riffs on the smallest physical details, Brodkey's proponents regularly compare him to Proust. The analogy may someday prove accurate, but this book does not make the case. Perhaps Party of Animals, which is rumored to be sprawling and multivolumed, will demonstrate Proustian breadth, the ability to evoke an entire, glittering world from a mass of perceptions. For now, the sharpest impression given by Brodkey is of an artist entranced, and imprisoned, by a narrow range of self-preoccupations...
Today Lacroix has a Proustian sense of his childhood. He was taken up by a little band of mini-aesthetes: "We were like dandies, snobbish and arrogant. We might show up in green velvet suits and pink shirts and read Wilde -- anything we thought was daring." Christian was taxed with designing costumes for their amateur shows. He traces his enduring preoccupation with the turn of the century to this early research; at one point he plotted out a season-by-season directory of changes in the minutiae of fin-de-siecle fashion...
...somewhere between the Proustian ambience of Woody Allen's films and the never-never land of the Emerald City: a town of tart talk and smooth tunes, where women sported black silk stockings and Cadillacs purred down clean streets kept orderly by serried ranks of trusted policemen. The skyline, crowned by the 1,250-ft. Empire State Building, was the most imposing man-made sight in the world, and at night it glowed with the fires of 2 million aspirations. Visitors to Grand Central Station, where the trains were out of sight and the zodiac was on the ceiling, could...
When he was six or seven and spending many of his days in British hospitals, a nurse gave Dudley Moore a good-night kiss. Her name was Pat, and 40 years later he can still feel the imprint of her lips on his cheek. He describes it in Proustian terms. "I almost spin when I think of it," he says. "She was truly an angel of mercy, and that kiss was probably the first taste of real, unqualified, uncomplicated affection I had ever had. In many ways my entire life is based on recapturing that single moment of affection...