The Proustian Fabric engages the complex layers of association to be found in Proust's work. According to Christie McDonald, "Remembrance of Things Past straddles the dominant thinking patterns of two centuries: the nineteenth, in which the association of fragmentary thought was to be subsumed into the notion of a totality, and the twentieth, in which the notion of associative thinking was to move toward an infinite process of referral and interpretation." Imbued with McDonald's discerning knowledge of Proust's intellectual and historical milieu, his compendious writing and his critics, The Proustian Fabric is one of the first books to take into account the rich variations of the new editions and to reexamine certain suppositions about Proust's methods, as well as his concern with philosophy, literature, art, and politics.