This inventive novel catalogs the lives of Minnesota's Darton Hall College class of 1969. The chapters alternate between a narrative of their year-late 30th reunion in the hot July of 2000 and forays into the characters' various pasts. This technique allows us to see them in the flower of their full-blown neuroses and then go back to the etiology of the mess that most of their lives are in.

The chapters describing the past are sufficiently self-contained to have their own titles and be published as short stories in The New Yorker. Having read some of them as they came out, it was fun to read the book and realize, hey, that's the guy who lost all the weight and told his fiancée he was the famous reclusive novelist Thomas Pierce. Or, oh yeah, she's the mastectomy survivor who drank five vodka lemonades and, topless, confronted her husband in their driveway. But there were characters entirely new to me as well, characters whose lives and habits were next to unbelievable. Like flashy Spook Spinelli, who lives in two different houses with two different husbands who know about and accept each other. Apparently even two husbands aren't enough for her, though, because they've recently caught her with a new lover. "She was out of control. She knew that. She needed that. Risk made her the Spook she was, something more than the sad, mute Caroline she had been christened. Risk kept her away from household poisons." Later in the same chapter we discover the source of her particular desperation, and the reason she's called Spook.

As we might expect from Tim O'Brien, whose previous works were so defined by Vietnam, this novel features both a veteran and a draft-dodger. David Todd's flashback to the predictably senseless slaughter in which he suffers wounds that lead to the loss of a leg is one of the first stories in the book. Here we are introduced to the sardonic voice of angel Johnny Ever coming over the transistor radio that David carries, tantalizing him with bleak views of his future, exhorting him to choose whether to live or die. "Think it over. No pressure. Either way, pal, nobody'd blame you." Johnny stays with David throughout the book, with David even coming to admit that "the man at the microphone was none other than David himself." But to the reader Johnny remains the cynical, profane voice of the most depraved experience: that of watching your friends die.

Is this truly meant as the "definitive novel of the baby boom generation," as the back jacket proclaims? As a slightly younger member of this generation I can say that few of my friends are as gloriously disturbed as the characters in this book. Under the glare of a novelist's pen our lives would dissolve into a puddle of relatively boring compromise. If there were "normal" people in the Darton Hall class of '69, Mr. O'Brien hasn't represented them in this sharp, compassionate book.

And we probably wouldn't want to read about them. You can say a lot of things about Spook Spinelli, but "dull" isn't one of them.