What T C Boyle , George Saunders , and Proust have in common

No doubt T. Coraghessen Boyle shares the same literary milieu as George Saunders - each writing for the most part about misfit loser men who've made terrible decisions about marriage and parenthood and who are stuck in menial jobs for which they feel, wrongly, overqualified. Each writes with a mordant humor. Boyle is a little more west coast slacker and Saunders more an upstate or Midwest working class outlaw, and Boyle has a much wider range of interest that he's explored in his novels but their short stories are to a degree e and w coast counterparts. Boyce's story in current New Yorker, The Relive Machine, owes a particularly deep debt to Saunders - as in many of S's stories this centers on a future techno home entertainment device a DVD like Bo's that by entirely unexplained retina scan recognition allows the user to relive in all dimensions any past moment of his life. The protag presumably like millions of others becomes so obsessed w reliving his life - at first for the sexual thrills but gradually to gain insight and understanding - that his current or actual life virtually disappears. The machine weirdly becomes his life. It may be just because I happen to be reading The Guermantes Way but it struck me of course that the experience of this story is exactly the experience of Proust's life, that at some point he stopped loving in the present and spent the remainder of his life in search his past - but of course Proust made great art out of his search. Just as iphones have made every idiot into a photographer the relive machine would make every idiot a pseudoproust. The fact is that reliving one's life would be an exceptionally painful experience for most of us am done would need the sensibility of Proust or St Augustine to make of the search for lost time anything that could benefit or even entertain others - let alone one's self.