Word: proustians
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Boston Adventure attempts not only the Proustian sentence structure and philosophical overtones, but also the use of fantasy as a literary method. Sonia, who spends a disturbing amount of her childhood sleeping on the floor on a pallet, dreams about a wealthy, untouchable Boston spinster named Miss Pride. She met Miss Pride while working as a chambermaid in the Hotel Barstow in Chichester, just outside Boston. "Over and over again," dreams Sonia, "until my eyes closed, I imagined the day on which my parents would die and Miss Pride would come to take me to live at the Hotel...." Eventually...
Russian Interlude. The interval between Sonia's wild daydreaming and her actual departure for Boston is less Proustian than Russian. Her father, a frustrated, hard-drinking man, pulls out one night, never to be heard of again. (The family is sure he headed West, since he practically lived on Riders of the Purple Sage.) Her unwanted, sensitive, epileptic younger brother Ivan dies after spending several hours lying in the snow. Then her mother, a luscious, emotional woman, loses her sanity and is packed off to an institution...
...almost to Piltdown man, but one of Britain's most iridescent contemporary writers (England Reclaimed, Escape with Me). Left Hand, Right Hand ("the lines of the left hand are incised unalterably at birth . . . those of the right hand are modified by one's actions") is a neo-Proustian, witty remembrance of things (mainly amusing) from the proud Sitwellian past. It is also a latter-day Book of Snobs, in which converge "all [the] diverse rays of lineage" that form that "mixture of blood which in England constitutes the aristocratic tradition...
...death of his wife (to whom he was devoted), Berry Wall, 77, began to write (entirely from memory) his memoirs. When he died last spring they were still unpublished. This week they were published under the title Neither Pest Nor Puritan. To read them was like reading a Proustian novel written not by Proust, but by one of his vacuous, arrogant characters...