He is generally a patient and illuminating guide, with something of the fervor and hortatory rhetoric of the accomplished schoolmaster. Shattuck is very good, for instance, in explaining the nature of the double ''I'' of Proustian narration. Henry James warned novelists against the ''terrible fluidity'' of first-person narration. I'' that is both fissured and fused, moving fluidly and sometimes vertiginously between the present of the narrator and the past of ''Marcel,'' building multiple temporal perspectives into a single sentence. He demonstrates that the recognitions we are led to don't ultimately promote an ideology of art but rather an illumination of life.
Art is, in Proust's term, a ''translation'' of life.
Proust's Way'' recycles them, with some reorganization and with some additional material, part of it published as articles in The New York Review of Books and elsewhere. Like Proust himself, Shattuck seems to have been rewriting the same book for a number of years, seeking to find its best form. Shattuck offers his readers help on editions and translations. The Captive'' onward. Publication of the last three of the seven parts of the ''Search'' was posthumous, and all versions of them have necessarily involved difficult editorial decisions.