Despite many great passages, the second half of Proust's The Prisoner gets tedious

 Despite the many pleasures and astonishing moments in Book 5 (The Prisoner) of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, some of which I've quoted in previous posts, this volume in particular seems to be heavily freighted w/ long passages about social caste, class, and just plain snobbery, all of which Proust seems to want to bring down but which, somehow, become the complete milieu of The Prisoner. The first half of the volume is focused on the narrator's - who he at last admits is named Marcel! - extreme jealousy regarding his beloved Albertine, in particular a jealousy about her rumored lesbian relationships with other young women. The novel shifts at about the midpoint to focus on a party at Mme Verdurin's in which the ultimate snob and creep throughout the entire Search, M. de Charlus, arranges to have his much younger and untitled protege/lover play violin in a septet previously unheard by the late composer Vinteuil (Marcel's fave!); the importance of a live performance, we realize, is almost unimaginable today - compared w/ the 1920s when there was no possible way to hear music of high-quality in any way but in concert of private performance. This section of the novel gives Proust leeway to offer many insights on musicology - a high point of the volume - and then concludes w/ many pages of social diatribe: M. de Charlus undercuts the host family, the Verdurins, trying to get all the credit for the performance and the event, making sure that all the guests speak to him personally on their way out while insinuating to all that the Verdurins played no role in staging the successful event - but Mme Verdurin gets her revenge, as she turns the violinist, Morel, against he sugar daddy and benefactor. All of this I found disconcerting and sometimes tedious. Ditto for the 20 of so pages near the end of this section, in which Charlus and others express their contemptuous views on homosexuality; Charlus suggests that a near majority of men are homosexual and tells his friend Brichot, a Sorbonne prof., that someday they will teach homosexuality in his school - sounded like a joke in 1920, but in a way her foresaw "queer studies." The final 100-pp of the volume concern Albertine's "escape" from the "prison" of Marcel's family home.