As a Proust veteran I wish Alex Clark (Proust, Powell and the truly long read are a summer treat, 6 August) luck in completing the marathon. But it is a pity that the British have turned the novel into a testosterone test (or fest) of endurance, perceived as an achievement more akin to climbing Mount Everest than a pleasurable immersion in an alternative and more glamorous world. A streak of British philistine puritanism is surely at play in this view, for to prefer the manly stiff upper lip and unfailing irony of Powell (a terrific writer in his own way) might seem suspiciously close to a moralistic rejection of the naughtiness, self-indulgence, voyeurism, venom, love of beauty (the man’s interested in women’s clothes, for God’s sake) and camp bitchiness of the sickly homosexual foreigner, Marcel Proust.
PS Isn’t Paradise Lost, a kind of novel with a dark hero, very relevant to our troubled times?
Elizabeth Wilson
London
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