Books: Proust on Pinckney Street

BOSTON ADVENTURE—Jean Stafford—Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

Every now & then, since Marcel Proust's death in 1922, a young American writes urbanely and philosophically about his or her past in long, rhythmic, qualified sentences and is forthwith called "the American Proust." Miss Stafford is the latest to be thus crowned. But while Proust was from birth an accepted member of the decadent Parisian society about which he wrote in Remembrance of Things Past, Miss Stafford's proxy, Sonia Marburg, is rather painfully not a socialite. Sonia is the dreaming, sensitive daughter of a German shoemaker and...

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