THE YEAR OF READING PROUST: A Memoir in Real Time.<i> By Phyllis Rose</i> .<i> Scribner: 268 pp., $23</i>

Unlike most businesses, literary criticism prides itself on providing an impersonal service. Critics are expected to deliver objective assessments of literary works or, failing that, to confess honestly areas in which gender, class or generation has led them to fall short of impartiality. They are prized for something ordinary folk rarely manage: their ability to separate themselves from a book.

We don’t expect critics to tell us, in the course of a literary interpretation, where they like to read (on the roof terrace), what the weather was like when they were reading (very humid, and I have no air-conditioning) or how they feel about the jacket (great). The result of such reticence is an admirable objectivity. And yet, one could argue, it also results in an unrealistic level of detachment.

When the common reader sinks into a book, a host of nonliterary considerations typically accompanies him or her. We read a book at a particular time of our lives--when in love, at the beach or between marriages--and the resultant zeitgeist typically weaves itself, however subtly, into our reading. We fall in love with characters because their names have pleasant personal associations; we are reminded of passages when we’re waiting for luggage at the airport carousel or we fail to finish a book because it drops into the bath. In short, we are hopelessly personal readers.

Which appears to be the starting point for Phyllis Rose’s memoir, “The Year of Reading Proust.” Rose, an English professor at Wesleyan University and the author of numerous works of literary criticism, begins her memoir by revealing that she will describe a year in which she read the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time.” What makes the enterprise promising is that Proust is one of those rare authors whose work really does color any period in which it is read. A year reading Proust is sure to be unlike any other, or as Rose sums it up more baldly, “I can definitely say that my life was changed by reading Proust.”

In an echo of Proust’s famous opening sentence (“For a long time, I would go to bed early . . .”), Rose begins by telling us that for a long time, she used to try to read Proust, but failed repeatedly, guiltily giving up somewhere beyond Page 50. Then one year, she threw herself wholeheartedly into the task: “Reading Proust became as much a way of life as a literary pastime, closer to a religious practice than to the usual discrete encounter with a single work of art.”

Rose describes some outcomes of this religious practice: First, she noticed how wise Proust was. “Generations of critics have told us we are not supposed to read novels for what they have to tell us about life, but Proust seemed to have many things he wanted to say or rather explain about human nature and I wanted to hear,” she writes.

Rose spent her winter in a rented house in Key West, Fla., which she found had strong similarities to Proust’s fictional Normandy town of Balbec. During the summer, she also discovered that Proust could illuminate the social dynamics of Martha’s Vineyard.

Having set up the expectation that her book will be a meditation on Proust’s work and a reflection on her own life as illuminated by Proust, Rose changes tack. Or rather, she throws Proust overboard. After spending 20 pages discussing the effect Proust has had on her, she decides that she doesn’t want to tell us much about the French writer and would be happier dwelling exclusively on her own life. Her explanation? “Proust is deeply competitive, it’s always a choice between yourself and him,” she says. And we soon realize that Proust has lost.

What remains is a book that uses Proust’s name as a piece of elegant and rather deceptive scaffolding holding up a personal memoir, one which might just as well have been called “The Year of Reading Dostoevsky” for all the insight it gives us into Proust’s work. Not that this necessarily matters, as long as readers drawn by the title are not expecting anything much about Proust.

What, then, is there to know about Phyllis Rose? That she is a twice-married middle-aged academic who divides her time between Manhattan and Key West. She loves to entertain (“I like dinner parties where all the other guests are known . . .”), though she is aware that dinner parties can fritter away the energies of a writer. She is close to her mother, whose health is fragile and who has had to be accompanied to the hospital on numerous occasions. She keeps us informed of her cooking, even gives us some culinary tips (“add a little olive oil to the water in which you cook the pasta”) and tells us about her garden (“the worst time of year for our garden is July, when the Japanese beetles take over”).

She also likes to watch a lot of television (“No matter how much time I’ve spent this year reading Proust, I’ve spent more watching television”) and owns a 20-inch Mitsubishi with a color screen. So great is her love of TV that she recounts how an affair with an intellectual older publisher came to an end after he critiqued her choice of programs.

After some psychoanalysis, Rose realized that, “I didn’t belong with a man who looked down on popular culture. I should never ally myself . . . with a man who doesn’t like scary movies and junk TV.”

One night in Key West, Salman Rushdie comes for dinner; another time, Rose attends a literary seminar on “American Writers and the Natural World.” She chats about how she changed her car. Her Honda Accord was seven years old and had 100,000 miles on the odometer. She wanted a Mercedes. (“For me, the Mercedes was the car of artists and intellectuals, people who appreciated classics . . . who read Jane Austen and Thackeray.”) But her husband didn’t agree, so they compromised by buying a Saab.

The book is an entertaining read like listening to the conversation of a pleasingly gossipy friend. Though so many recent memoirs, such as Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club” and Kathryn Harrison’s “The Kiss,” have been catalogs of domestic horror, Rose’s details a completely ordinary existence, in so far as one can ever use the term “ordinary” to describe the life of a prosperous East Coast intellectual at the close of the 20th century.

She leads a notably charmed existence: There are no financial fears. She has some lovely friends. Her second husband sounds ideal. Her son is grown and responsible, and there are only occasional worries about mortality and career, expressed in an elegantly melancholy way.

Only at the very end of the book does Rose return briefly to Proust. She tells us that though she liked reading his work, she realized when she finished it that she actually felt a lot closer to the work of the Goncourt brothers, whose diary--which Proust famously mocked--is a fantastically gossipy record of Parisian literary life.

“A diarist by temperament, I must acknowledge my descent from the Goncourts. I honor Proust but I am not of his species,” she concludes.

Perhaps “The Year of Reading Proust” would have made better sense had Rose fitted her material into an envelope called “The Year of Reading the Goncourt Brothers.”