THE BOOKS THAT TRULY HELP THE SELF ARE NOT IN THE SELF-HELP SECTION

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, September 28, 1997

Page: F4

Section: Books

Though I find self-help and human-potential programs excruciating, I really do enjoy reading the manuals and enchiridions associated with them. I have one here called ``Ten Stupid Things Men Do to Mess Up Their Lives'' by Dr. Laura Schlessinger (HarperCollins, $24), a syndicated radio talk-show personage. She claims this book is directed primarily at men, but of course it isn't: For all the stupid things that men do do, they don't buy books like this, never mind read them. Women do, though; and some may, indeed, be uncynical enough to believe, for instance, that a man in mid-divorce would finally look into his soul and realize that among his ``Top 10 Screwups'' were ``Listening only with one ear,'' ``Constantly watching cable TV sports,'' and ``Slipshod personal hygiene.'' I had to admire this book for its dauntlessness in maintaining the fiction that it is for and about men, while pandering shamelessly to its true readers, to their wishful thinking that men, in reading it, would be encouraged to become more like women.

I have no idea who exactly has been reading ``How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel'' by Alain de Botton, but they are legion. I picked the book up dubiously, expecting little pleasure from it, since Proust is not, so to speak, my cup of tea. (``I am reading Proust for the first time,'' Evelyn Waugh wrote to John Betjeman in 1948. ``Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective. I remember how small I used to feel when people talked about him & didn't dare admit I couldn't get through him. Well I can get through him now -- . . . the chap was plain barmy.'') As it turns out, it doesn't really matter what you think of Proust, or whether you have read one word of his, for de Botton's book is supremely charming on its own terms. It is a tour de force, being all at once a clever sendup of the self-help manual, a personal reflection, and a book of humane wisdom.

While de Botton clearly admires Proust, he does not gloss over the novelist's unfortunate traits: We are, after all, talking about a world-class bed slug, if nothing worse. But it is the very unsatisfactoriness of the neurasthenic one's real life that makes employing him as a foil for self-help so terribly funny, a feat that de Botton pulls off with delicate bathos. By the time I had finished reading this book, de Botton's good humor and taste for impromptu association, his observations on the consolation of novels, and his own spareness of prose had almost erased the feeling of tedium that comes over me at just the name ``Proust.''

One undoubtable consequence of this surprising if well-deserved success is that, even as you read this, people are buffing up their own versions of de Botton's project. ``How Kafka Can Help You Feel You Belong'' and ``How Machiavelli Can Clarify Your Personal Values'' may even now be making their way over some transom. But the fact is, you don't have to wait for these works to materialize. If you liked ``How Proust Can Change Your Life,'' you will most assuredly like L. Rust Hills's ``How to Retire at Forty-One,'' an even more accomplished and witty effort at bringing past thinkers to bear on the present. You will find this great work (still in print, for a miracle) in the volume ``How to Do Things Right,'' a collection of three books by Hills (it also contains the title work and ``How to Be Good''; from David R. Godine, $22.95 in hardback, $15.95 paper).

Successfully retiring at 41 comes down quite simply to learning how to live with oneself, which after all is the essential goal of every self-help book from Plato to Deepak Chopra, MD. Still, accomplishing that formidable task has become more consuming and, indeed, increasingly difficult in these latter days as the self has established itself as the ultimate reality. You may applaud this or (more likely) lament it, but accept it you must, for there's no going back. At the very least, the situation is such that, as Nietzsche observes, ``He who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser.''

Still, without going back, we may reach back; and this Hills does, providing both enlightenment and entertainment through idiosyncratic, aberrantly pragmatic readings of Montaigne and Thoreau. He does this in the course of describing his own life in retirement: a most deliberate affair of lists, plans, and projects; of constructing and managing an identity, an identity that ultimately fractures to horrifying and darkly comic effect. It is astonishing to me that this book is so little known, for it is truly a work of genius. It is not only painfully, self-effacingly funny, but salutary and genuinely inspiring.

It seems to me that people in the past had a good deal more unpleasantness to put up with compared with us here and now, the readers of this paper -- of which, of course, I am one. And if those bygone poxy, gum-rotted, bereaved, infrequently bathed men and women -- and I refer to members of the literate classes -- could find solace and dignity in the works of dead persons, why should we dose ourselves with the insipid Dr. Laura? I'd recommend hauling out the big medicine: Nietzsche or Chesterton -- or Thoreau or Montaigne, for that matter.

Apposite to this, I would like to mention that one of my absolutely favorite novels has recently appeared in paperback. ``Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream'' (St. Martin's, $11.95 paper) by John Derbyshire is a first novel and takes as its subject Chai, a Chinese businessman who now lives in New York. Throughout his life, which has had some very terrible passages, he has drawn intellectual and spiritual sustenance from a series of thinkers. As this witty, beautifully written tale begins, Chai has just moved on from Dr. Johnson to Calvin Coolidge. What follows combines irony and sweetness in equal measure: a perfect tonic for the modern soul.