Bring your problems to Marcel

THINK of this as a kind of self-help manual for the literate classes. Instead of turning to Shirley Conran or Deepak Chopra for spiritual support or uplifting soundbites, we are urged to look to Marcel Proust as a source of wisdom, inspiration and succour.

Chapters with titles such as How to Love Life Today and How to Be a Good Friend definitely suggest that self-improvement is Ala in de Botton's underlying intention. But don't necessarily imagine that happiness is intended as the goal.

The longest section in the book is called How to Suffer successfully and, after all, few men have suffered quite so volubly or at such length as Proust. Even when sending a telegram to a newly-married couple, he was unable to resist diverting attention to his own ill-health. "Congratulations," ran the message. "I am not writing to you at greater length, because I have caught the flu and am tired.

Tiredness, of course, is a condition familiar to the many readers who have failed to complete A la Becherche do Temps Perdu. How Proust Can Change Your Life lacks a chapter advising how not to be daunted by the sheer scale and wordiness of the original novel. At well over a million words (and precious few short sentences) A la Recherche, even were it to be repackaged with a glossy cover bearing raised gold lettering, would still fail to attract a large audience.

Suggestions on How to Be Part of a Distinguished Minority might have been helpful for readers who have managed to remain loyal until the Princesse de Guermantes's party in the book's final pages. While the alien nature of the Proustian world is part of its attraction, the seemingly inexhaustible loquaciousness of the narrator will always be a deterrent for attracting new admirers.

Which, presumably, is the euphoniously-named de Botton's intention with this slender offering: an enthusiastic and impressively well-informed admirer of Proust serves up an easy-to-follow guide to the work.

His success, however, is only limited because the scale of A la Recherche together with its vast range of characters makes any summary impossible. Like every other work on Proust, therefore, this is essentially for the already-enthralled, and if you are of this band, then de Botton will charm and irritate in equal measure.

His charm derives from an ability to quote at ease and pertinently from the novel and the correspondence alike. He is never pompous, palpably loves his subject, but is not blind to his faults. How Proust Can Change Your Life is occasionally critical, especially of Proust's notorious snobbery and habit of ingratiating himself with anyone whose friendship he sought.

The chapter How To Be A Good Friend contains handy tips for anyone whose social stock seems a little low - provided, that is, that like Proust you are prepared to be indecently generous (adding 200 per cent to the service charge in restaurants), intensely curious and devoid of overt egotism ("He was happy to see others laughing and he laughed," wrote George de Lauris).

Somewhat less endearing is de Botton's intermittent habit of drawing on his own experience to illustrate the continuing relevance of Proust's apercus. He includes a photograph of his girlfriend Kate because he thinks she "bears a striking resemblance" to a description of Albertine, even though the former "has never read Proust and prefers George Eliot, Marie Claire after a difficult day".

Earlier, the Duchesse de Guermantes is compared to "the fifty-five-year-old stepmother of an ex-girlfriend, even though this unsuspecting lady speaks no French, has no title and lives in Devon".

It is true that when reading the successive volumes of Proust's roman fleuve, many readers have likened their friends to fictional characters in A la Recberche. De Botton quotes Virginia WooIf, so devastated by the brilliance of the French novel and its insights that she was impelled to exclaim "Oh, if I could write like that . . . One has to put the book down and gasp."

Woolf's remarks come in the final chapter, called How to Put Books Down. Sensibly, the final judgment is left to Proust, who wrote that "Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it." Reading Proust may not change anyone's life, but will certainly offer enhancement.