BOOK REVIEW : A Sobering Sample of ‘90s Adolescence : SOUTH OF HEAVEN: Welcome to High School at the End of the Twentieth Century <i> by Thomas French</i> ; Doubleday $22.95, 363 pages

The Florida high school students portrayed in this work of vivid novelistic nonfiction may wear pocket pagers and listen to 2 Live Crew, but the intense pressure to succeed that weighs so heavily on their shoulders could be drawn straight out of “Four Eyes,” Randy Newman’s song about his first day at school in the 1950s:

“One September morning, when I was five / My daddy said, ‘Son, rise from your bed.’ / I thought, I must be dreaming, it’s still dark outside! / He said, ‘Son if you fall behind, you’ll never get ahead.’ ” Handing the boy a Roy Rogers lunch pail, the singer’s father counsels, “Son, it’s time to make us proud of you, / It’s time to do what’s right / Gonna have to learn to work hard,” then he drives “off into the morning light.”

As one reads “South of Heaven,” however, it becomes clear that the two generations react to this pressure in strikingly different ways. While most ‘50s kids saw Ozzie and Harriet’s rules as a guiding force, ‘90s kids seem convinced that there’s no use trying to excel in a world where presidents lie, fathers leave and the economy sinks.

This is not to say that these kids lack spunk and verve. Thomas French, a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times, shows that they have, in fact, created a rich culture of rebellion against the expectations placed on them. Under the headline: THE MIND IS A WONDERFUL THING TO WASTE, for instance, one popular T-shirt sports a drawing of a human brain with lines pointing to various skill centers: History, Sex, Art, Math. All skills are scratched out and replaced by the word PARTY--except, of course, for Sex.

These may be relatively privileged kids, living on a coast where breezes from dark green Gulf of Mexico waters waft over towering palm trees. But as he wanders through their campus, French keeps hearing students talk of the Apocalypse. “We could die at any minute,” says one student at lunch, “and all these teachers worry about is homework.”

Perhaps trying to justify his investment of time at Largo High--he spent a year there and several more years interviewing students and teachers--French sometimes reaches for overblown metaphors; e.g., “The yellow buses pull in, faintly glowing in the early morning like some radioactive wagon train.” But in general he does an excellent job of digging to the roots of these kids’ wild cynicism:

“Teen-agers may not read much, but in between flipping channels they’ve caught a few of the latest updates on the national deficit and the homicide rate and the health care crisis and the destruction of the rain forest and the seemingly imminent collapse of just about everything on the planet. They know what kind of mess they’re inheriting. And they know who’s going to end up paying for it and living with it. When they see the old clips of Ronald Reagan and all the other politicians chuckling and waving at the cameras, kids understand who’s being laughed at. Ultimately, the joke will be on them. “

What most disheartens these kids, however, is the disintegration of their families, something French railed against earlier this month in a stinging New York Times Op-Ed piece: “Whenever parents ask what’s gone wrong with our public schools,” he wrote, “my first instinct is to hand them a mirror.”

Whether the family breakdown is because of divorce, runaway fathers or overworked, absentee parents, French poignantly shows that many kids tend to blame themselves for it. After one boy’s stepfather shatters an ashtray against a wall, for example, the boy collects the shards and brings them to school. He clutches them to his chest, insisting to his teacher that he has to try to put everything back together.

French’s argument that these kids are not simply suffering from the age-old travails of coming of age is supported by a steep rise over the last decade in teen suicide rates, a trend that hits home when the captain of the Largo High football team fatally shoots himself in the head.

Still, one can’t help suspecting that French’s reportorial style led him to unrealistically bleak conclusions. While Tracy Kidder, in his impressive 1989 book “Among Schoolchildren,” focused on only one classroom for a year and thus was able to appreciate its small triumphs, French wanders the whole campus, taking in, inevitably, what stands out: counselors managing behavior problems, “shadowy” students who show up at school but never actually attend class.

And so like the kids he profiles, French learns to shield himself against disappointment by suppressing his hopes. When he checks up on Mike, for instance, a problem kid who dropped out after years of affecting “the fervently indifferent air of someone fighting to convince himself that the world has nothing interesting left to show him,” he actually finds that Mike is doing well, with a good job, a happy marriage and a church.

But when he hears that Mike’s wife is pregnant, French remains deeply skeptical about his future, asking him: “Isn’t it possible that the cycle is about to begin again and that your child will end up as embittered as you were?”

Here, at least, the journalist is clearly more pessimistic than his subject. Mike looks down at the table, French reports, and says, “There are no guarantees . . . But if he’s a good father, if he makes sure that his child feels the strength of his love, then he believes everything will work out.”