DATE: Thursday, September 11, 1997          TAG: 9709110043

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book review 

SOURCE: BY CHARLENE CASON 

                                            LENGTH:   81 lines

LITERARY SELF-HELP: LIFE LESSONS FROM A HYPOCHONDRIAC

GENERALLY, IT seems, people who read the work of Marcel Proust fall into three categories: those who have a firm grasp on his philosophy, those who are overly influenced by his writings and those who suppose his asthma treatments so addled poor Marcel's brain that it took him years of lying bundled in blankets in bed and seven volumes to get to the point of his memoir, ``In Search of Lost Time,'' or ``Remembrance of Things Past.''

The author of ``How Proust Can Change Your Life'' claims to fall into the first category. Englishman Alain de Botton says Proust's tome was ``far from a memoir tracing the passage of a more lyrical age, it was a practical, universally applicable story about how to stop wasting time and start to appreciate life.'' Yes, indeed, the wheezy, allergic Frenchman with a hypersensitivity to soaps, high altitudes, food, travel and noise, who rarely left his bed (his choice) for the last 14 years of his life, must surely have been an authority on appreciating life.

This cynical opinion, I suppose, lands me flat in the third category of Proust readers. I find his work - while poetic - rambling and, inevitably, circuitous. Most literary critics vow he was deadly serious and pathetically devoted to his theories, but I think Proust was full of himself and enjoyed a huge inside joke on the world's intellectuals.

So, it's intriguing to pick up a book with such a tongue-in-cheek title as, ``How Proust Can Save Your Life.'' The jacket touts this book as ``a hilarious, utterly unexpected self-help manual'' so, by golly, that's what I was set to read.

Unfortunately, like Proust, de Botton takes his own sweet time getting to the ``hilarious'' part. In fact, I'm not quite sure where it is. The titles of his nine chapters hold more humor than most of the text. Examples: ``How to Read for Yourself,'' ``How to Suffer Successfully'' and ``How to Put Books Down.''

De Botton draws conclusions from Proust's writings, then illustrates how the eccentric hypochondriac's theories on convoluted relationships and artistic vocations can make anyone a better person. But most of the comparisons actually make more sense than whimsy.

In ``How to Suffer Successfully,'' de Botton reviews Proust's thesis that because we only really think energetically when we're distressed, people shouldn't worry about striving for happiness so much as ``pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy.'' It all becomes perfectly clear when de Botton explains, ``Only when plunged into grief do we have the Proustian incentive to confront difficult truths, as we wail under the bedclothes, like branches in the wind.'' Funny - but also, sadly, true for some folks.

It wasn't until around page 105 of this slight book that I actually got the rhythm of de Botton's somewhat warped reasoning and frequent shifts from his own thoughts to Proust's.

In ``How to Put Books Down'' (as in, literally, laying them aside, versus insulting them), the author asks, ``How seriously should we take books?'' Then he writes that ``Proust manifested a singular awareness of the dangers of taking books too seriously,'' and that a healthy relationship with them depends ``as much on an appreciation of their limitations as of their benefits.''

Now, the avid reader is pretty aware of the benefits of books, but just what are their limitations? Why, books might ``subjugate our independence or smother the nuances'' of our own lives, according to Proust, says de Botton.

There is always a danger that the habit of reading may turn one into an ``overreverent, overreliant reader.'' Such people are easily identified by the symptoms they exhibit, such as, mistaking writers for oracles, being unable to write after reading a good book, or becoming artistic idolators.

At the end of this chapter, which is, thankfully, the end of the book, de Botton warns that ``there is no greater homage we could pay to Proust than to pass the verdict on him that . . . for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.'' In one brief, Proustian moment I realized the same might be said of ``How Proust Can Change Your Life.'' MEMO: Charlene Cason, a former staff reporter, is a writer who lives in

Edenton, N.C. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

``How Proust Can Change Your Life''

Author: Alain de Botton

Publisher: Pantheon. 197 pp.

Price: $19.95

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