High school confidential

IF you like high school reunions, if you’ve looked up old classmates on the Internet, if you’re thirtysomething and still watch “The Breakfast Club” or if you’re over 40 and will listen to Led Zeppelin only on vinyl, then you’ll read these books quickly and with great pleasure. It hardly matters that one of them is smart, warm and gracefully restrained, while the other is overwritten and occasionally pompous. Some people enjoy driving by the old school. Others don’t.

What we have here are two subgenres of what I call alumni lit.

“Wonderland,” by Sports Illustrated reporter Michael Bamberger, is descended from such books as Cameron Crowe’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and David Owen’s “High School,” both circa 1980, in which the grown-up reporter returns to school to see what kids are like these days. (Unlike Bamberger, Crowe and Owen looked young enough to go undercover as students; Crowe’s subjects were onto him, but Owen managed to fool everybody.)

Former Salon.com editor Chris Colin’s “What Really Happened to the Class of ‘93,” meanwhile, is a frank homage to “What Really Happened to the Class of ‘65?,” Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky’s bestselling oral history of their Los Angeles high school classmates, 10 years after graduation.

Alumni lit has only two proper aims: sating the romantically backward longings of saps like me and providing competent reports about the state of things -- how the kids talk, how well they’re taught, how much dope they smoke or how these matters have changed in the years since graduation.

Alumni lit fails when it overestimates its importance and exceeds its mission. High school trends are not always harbingers of major social change. Sixteen-year-olds are not repositories of special wisdom. Their meandering paths after graduation are not Buddha-like spiritual wanderings. High school kids are kids, and a good book will treat them as such.

“Wonderland,” a year in the life of about a dozen students at Pennsbury High School, outside Philadelphia, gets it just right. It let me step dreamily into the halls of high school again, but after reading the book, I emerged with a sense of what has changed, both in myself and in high school, since I graduated in 1992.

Bamberger chose Pennsbury because he was intrigued by news reports citing its prom as being the best high school dance in the country. Working on the prom committee is a real honor for a Pennsbury student; advising the committee is an important faculty job. The townsfolk line the streets on prom night, watching a parade of bedecked students, an honor other towns would reserve for conquering football heroes. One tradition is to chauffeur your date in the craziest car you can find, and one of Bamberger’s subplots follows Harry, a film-obsessed student eager to arrive at the prom in the souped-up DeLorean driven by Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future.”

Following a standard year-in-the-life format, “Wonderland” tracks diverse kids, cutting from one to another, following romantic breakups, sports triumphs and family crises. The prom is only an endpoint, really, a place for all the stories to converge. As we read about Rob and Stephanie, about to become teenage parents, we wonder if they will stay together long enough to go to the prom (and will they find a baby-sitter?). We root for Bob, the ambitious junior whose mission is to persuade pop singer John Mayer to be the prom’s musical act.

It surely helps that Bamberger is a sportswriter, trained to find human interest, even meaning, in stuff that basically means nothing -- grown-ups swinging sticks at balls, as a cynic would say. Pennsbury sends students to junior college, not the Ivy League, and they become accountants, car salesmen and laborers, not surgeons or sculptors. Yet Bamberger never pities them; he never lapses into stereotype.

The high school he describes is not a seething beehive of back stabbing, cocaine use and anorexia -- those may be present, but if so, Bamberger misses them. What he captures are the minutiae: close friends drifting apart, the athlete giving up on a pro career, the boy learning the work schedule of the hot waitress at T.G.I. Friday’s and the audio-visual geek living his high school experience at one remove, always taping the big events.

The prom is a thin conceit, one that Bamberger’s fine book might have done without. When the big night finally arrives, it is just one night in the lives of some unspectacular people, and the author knows it. His pleasure in writing “Wonderland” seems to be, besides the nostalgic thrill, the reportorial challenge, getting deep, way deep, inside ordinary people’s lives.

That modest aim does not suffice for Colin, whose “What Really Happened to the Class of ‘93” is a hunt for grander quarry. For Colin, the lives of his northern Virginia classmates, 15 of whom he tracked down and profiled as their 10th reunion approached are symbolic of something big. As they went, so went the entire country.

He is given to portentous descriptions of his generation’s spirit: “We had mourned the Rodney King verdict, weathered the Gulf War, and rebounded from the recession -- now it was time to look forward.” “To have attended high school from 1989 to 1993 is to have seen the world begin shifting, albeit through the haze of adolescence.”

I’m afraid not. There have, of course, been times when everything seemed to change. As Virginia Woolf wrote, “In or about December, 1910, human character changed” -- and maybe it did, with the rise of modernism, followed by the Great War.

The world changed again in the late 1960s, which is what makes the older book, “What Really Happened to the Class of ‘65?,” such compelling reading. But despite the rise of the Internet and the fall of the World Trade Center, the last 10 years have not effected some profound shift in human mentality.

I know some of my peers think otherwise. Colin’s alma mater, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., graduated a certain type of kid -- even Colin’s classmates who work in the arts or have renounced material possessions and study Eastern religion seem to be the kind of people who read Wired and keep blogs. But they are just one slice of American culture. Not everyone pushing 30 remembers the Nasdaq bust at the beginning of the decade as a turning point in life.

Colin is too busy positing seismic shifts to make the most of the little profundities inherent in finding old acquaintances. Some of Colin’s chapters are gripping, mostly those in which he has something at stake: dining with his old girlfriend, now married to another classmate from high school, or visiting his old nemesis Chris Sununu (son of John H. Sununu, a former New Hampshire governor and White House chief of staff), whom he remembers as a homophobic jerk.

Even in these chapters, however, Colin remains too focused on abstract ideas of generational character. Had his editor cut the ruminations, toned down the pontificating and told him to fill out the book with more of his classmates’ own words, Colin could have amplified the tangible joys found in his pages. Despite all its flaws, it poses a question that, for some of us anyway, is irresistible: “Whatever happened to ... ?” *