Naming Youths
André Aciman is our consummate Proustian. Even more than Roger Shattuck, who’s championed Proust in scholarly works, or Alain de Botton, who’s promoted Proustian self-help, Aciman has taken to heart the author’s injunction to use In Search of Lost Time as a personal darkroom—to dip the negatives of one’s own memories into the magic solution Proust provides. In his remarkable collection of essays, False Papers (2000), Aciman tells how his father first bought him Swann’s Way when he was fifteen (“I already knew I had just received, perhaps without my father’s knowing it, his dearest, most enduring