Books: Early Failure

PLEASURES AND REGRETS (221 pp.)—Marcel Proust—Lear-Crown ($2.75).

Only a handful of Parisians read this anemic little book when it first appeared in 1896. Few of them could have thought it likely that its author, a rather foppish and not very likable young social climber, would later devote the bulk of his adult life to composing one of the literary masterpieces of the times: Remembrance of Things Past. Even the most fanatical Proustians will have to grant that Pleasures and Regrets, now translated into English for the first time, is a trivial book. Languid little pseudo-pastoral sketches bedecked with whipped-cream imagery, pallid reflections...