The tedious passages in Proust - and what they mean

Let's be honest and acknowledge that reading Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (aka Remembrance of Things Past) is a little like a cross-country road trip - some stunningly beautiful scenes - mountains, rivers, prairies, towering cities, great lakes - that you will always remember and in between some long passages of tedium when you're totally road-weary. That's why nobody reads all 7 volumes in sequence, and it's why reading even one - e.g., "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" - is challenging and unsettling. After some beautiful observations on the nature of art and genius - M.'s meeting with the great novelist Bergotte at Mme Swann's - Proust goes off on some long gossipy sections in which Odette and Mmmes Bontemps and Cottard get catty with one another: Proust is almost absurdly and obsessively interested in the social pecking order of various Parisian salons - of course by the end of the Search his narrator will realize the absurdity himself, as he surveys his fallen society and reflects on his lost youth. But these passages are langeurs, if that's the right word, and though they can be tedious at times they are also part of the journey - of what makes the Search a great novel and of, in fact, what makes up a life.