There’s been plenty of anticipation for Kate Taylor’s Mme. Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, though not necessarily the kind a first-time novelist wants. Taylor is The Globe and Mail’s well-known theatre critic, respected by readers, but loathed by theatre folks stung by her tough reviews. The former group may be curious to know if Taylor’s fiction is as colourful as her journalism. The latter will certainly be hoping for a chance to see their old tormentor hoisted on her own critical petard.

Knowing this, Taylor is particularly brave to have set out to write such a big novel. Victorian in its baggy intricacy and postmodern in its thinking, Mme. Proust and the Kosher Kitchen spans 100 years, jumping back and forth between Europe and Canada and encompassing the lives of dozens of characters. It also takes on the Holocaust.

The novel’s various plots can be separated into three main strands. The first is presented mainly in the form of diaries written by Jeanne Proust, the doting mother of the famous French novelist. The fictional diaries tell the story of Proust’s extended adolescence – his bouts of asthma, his success on the Paris salon circuit, his as-yet-unrealized dreams of becoming a great writer. They also give us the views of Mme. Proust, a Jewish woman married to a Catholic bourgeois, on the place of Jews in French society in the era of the Dreyfus Affair.

Set in the present day, the second strand revolves around Marie, a Canadian Proust fanatic in her early thirties who travels to France to visit the Bibliotheque Nationale’s Proust collection. Once there, Marie stumbles onto Mme. Proust’s diaries and decides to translate them into English. Her reasons for doing this, we come to realize, are related to her relationship with the elusive, charismatic Max. For complex reasons, Marie has made a link in her mind between her friend and the young Proust.

Finally, we get the story of Sarah, Max’s mother, whose parents managed to have her sent to Canada just before they themselves were rounded up by the Nazis. After the war, Sarah returns to France to find out her parents’ fate. Later, she attempts to settle into a normal, middle-class Canadian life, but the wounds understandably haven’t healed. One way she tries to reckon with her past is through cooking, by creating kosher versions of classic French cuisine.

Taylor’s use of real historical figures, and of a scholar-detective who pieces together documents about the past, will be familiar to readers of any number of contemporary writers (Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Michael Ondaatje). Indeed, these techniques have evolved into something of a mini-genre, called historiographic metafiction by some critics and literary grave-robbing by others.

The genre provides writers a basis for looking at the complex relationships between history, day-to-day life, and storytelling. Taylor uses the technique to show how Marie’s process of sifting through old documents is analogous to, and bound up with, the way she assembles her fragmentary memories of Max into a coherent story. Life, like fiction, is a text that must be read and interpreted to be understood.

Interesting as this may be, it’s been done many times before. Taylor should have found a new way of going at the genre rather than simply – if intelligently – reiterating its central theses.

There’s a too-familiar quality to Taylor’s prose as well. “A fifteen-year-old girl breathes in and remembers a childhood in Paris” is clichéd. Word choices like “chum,” as in “a new chum from medical school,” are anachronistic. Has anybody under the age of 90 actually said “chum” in the last decade? Perhaps an intellectual like Marie would talk like this, but I have my doubts.

Such formal language distances readers from the characters, who in many cases already feel flat and underwritten. We’re never allowed close enough to Sarah, for example, to see her as a real person, which makes her harrowing story lack emotional punch. Some humanizing humour might have helped in this department. As it is, Sarah feels like a Dickenisan symbol of suffering rather than a living, breathing person.

Despite such problems, the book does establish narrative momentum as the multiple stories unfold. Taylor has a reporter’s ability to cut to the chase. More surprising is her deft juggling of the novel’s complex cluster of plots. Her excellent timing serves to both build tension and to underline the important connections between the different stories.

Ultimately, though, there’s little in Mme. Proust to set it apart from the crowd. As a first novel, it’s perfectly competent. But one senses that if this were a play Taylor were reviewing, she’d dismiss it with an impatient yawn.