Proust said he didn't understand how critics could divide literary works into good and bad patches, admiring the first half of a novel by Gautier but not the second, praising everything to do with Goriot in Père Goriot, damning everything to do with Rastignac. He was thinking of Emile Faguet, but we might think of F.R. Leavis performing the same sort of operation on Daniel Deronda. 'A book is still for me a living whole,' Proust said, 'with which I strike up an acquaintance from the very first line, that I listen to with deference, that I allow to be in the right all the time I am with it, without choosing and without arguing.' Proust's principle is admirable, but he hadn't read Albert Cohen, parts of whose Belle du Seigneur are so mawkishly terrible you wonder why the publishers haven't folded from embarrassment, while other parts are brilliantly, minutely observed, mercilessly funny, a parade of social and moral dissections that make Waugh and Montherlant look like teddy-bears.

LRB 30 November 1995 | PDF Download