Pleasures and Regrets.

By Marcel Proust. Translated by Louise Varese. New York: Ecco. 221 pp. $13.

Patrick Giles

Wielding an inspired talent for society not to be qualitatively matched by his fiction for at least another decade, young Marcel Proust was nonetheless eager to be noticed as a writer. Pleasures and Regrets, a collection of meditations, sketches, and fictionalized gossip published in 1896, includes amusing social comedy and dissections of passion and jealousy, none of which ever fully explains (or justifies) its author's ambitions - "the invisible vocation of which this book is the history," as Proust wrote, not of this book, but of the book, the reason we open Pleasures and Regrets at all.

Proust's debut was ambitiously launched in a deluxe edition illustrated by the hostess Madeleine Lemaire, with accompanying sheet music by Reynaldo Hahn. As with Swann's Way, publication costs were paid by the author. Another hostess prevailed upon one of Proust's literary gods (and model for his own Bergotte), Anatole France, to preface it - "bullied" and "extracted" are the terms used by biographers - who opens his appeal with the blunt "Why have I promised to undertake this most agreeable but perfectly useless task?" (Of these supporting materials, only France's preface appears in the Ecco reprint.) This frilly presentation backfired: it made Proust's book, as Roger Shattuck has noted, seem "like the work of a dilettante with powerful connections, even though it does not read that way." The book led to snide accusations of homosexuality in a particularly nasty review (by a critic who was himself homosexual), forcing Proust to challenge his fellow invert to a duel.

For us, Pleasures and Regrets is a literary treasure-hunt. We stalk its pages for the moment the apprentice writer vanishes beneath unpredictable torrents of invention. And here and there our prey feels so close. Time, death, and love are already his master themes, but he doesn't yet have a vision of them. Love and jealousy are recognizably treacherous but conventionally languaged and depicted, death melodramatized rather than confronted. As for the perception of time . . . Proustian fiction in the third person? As bizarre as Flannery O'Connor's would be in the first: individual consciousness, its passage through moments (experience) and lifetimes (memory) are his revelations, what he understood and communicated better than any other novelist. Proust's genius is impossible eulogized by an omniscient narrator.

But when Proust reaches his terrain - "A Dinner in Society" - he's off and running. He knows his way around and behind this battlefield. At once, the imagination capable of a masterpiece establishes strategies: the tone becomes searchingly comic; paragraphs discard conventional brevity; sentences extend themselves, partly from virtuosity but also because the author realizes that each nuance of every sentence's moment must be saved before the coffin nail of the period. Suddenly, what we're reading is a hairbreadth from "Proustian."

Unfortunately, Proust never fully arrives. He's still a snob - a bitch, too. These characters are little - their creator hasn't yet noticed (or learned to convey) the awareness of human frailty he'll impart to even his most peripheral later creations. Compare the slighter women in Pleasures with, say, the paragraph introducing Mlle. Vinteuil, the composer's daughter, in "Combray": precision, understanding, and conviction ennoble this awkward, later torturedly perverse, girl. Looking so far into human hearts also means facing (with enough confidence to enable skittish readers to follow) the mysteries of time and dissolution. He can't do that yet, either.

Should we knock Pleasures and Regrets for letting us down? Proust was only twenty-five; his formidable doctor father and inspiring mother still lived. ("Ideas come to us as successors to grief," he later wrote, amidst plenty of both.) It was at forty-two, finally, that the madeleines got chomped and the vocation crystallized, this weaker collection's details and faces regrouping to appear in an unprecedented panorama. The pages of the younger Proust aren't yet infallible: but already enticing.

Patrick Giles writes fiction and essays.