Scars? no more than scratches, is subtitled a novel and later referred to as a ""novel-essay""; it's a little of both and a minimal neither in which the author herself appears as frequently as her two characters, Eleanor and Sebastian, who seem to have figured in one of her plays. They are also a reflection of herself -- namely confident, attractive, pleasure-loving and perhaps doomed. Sagan is too wise not to realize that everything has come to her both too easily and too early (and just how long can it last?); perhaps she's not wise enough to think herself capable of de Beauvoiresque reflections on her writing, or her non-writing, on death and the mortality of just about everything in the world around her. She's not got the intellectual heft for that, let alone originality. But she is charming -- as perhaps only the French can be -- flirting overtly with or reproving the reader and providing her kind of random, intimate, degage commentary. Still we might well envy her facility which most of us can only apply to arranging cut flowers. And if there's an occasional thorn -- the damage can be no more than subcutaneous.