he Stars (1999), and Roger Shattuck's crisply intelligent and accessible Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time (2000), not to mention the film Time Regained (1999), by the Chilean director Raoul Ruiz. These latter make the best case for the belated arrival of Proust into our midst, for they are all, books and movie, pitched not to the academic but to the educated, interested lay audience. A spot check of the Amazon.com sales rankings shows the de Botton and Shattuck selling very well, along with the now-standard three-volume Random House paperback boxed set, in the revised C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin translation, which costs as much as a night at the opera and weighs as much as a magnum of champagne.
             Of course, I don't mean to convey the impression that Americans everywhere are suddenly converting to Proustianism -- God knows we're not about to replace televised wrestling with literary talking heads -- but within one little segment of our cultural Balkans the magus of the cork-lined room is making his presence felt. What strange counterintuitive flowerings of sensibility the times encourage -- that the master of reverie should be finding new readers in this era of hurtling signals. In a way, the perfect emblem for this paradox is Edmund White's mini-biography. The whole Penguin series is, after all, pitched to be digestible gist for the reader on the move, while Proust, obviously, stands for the opposite: his ideal map would unroll point for point over the territory to be traversed.
             Late-modern accelerations notwithstanding, there are a number of reasons why Proust's hour has come around again. For one thing, the passing of time has -- as is almost always the case with inno
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