ALL SOULS, by Christine Schutt, Harcourt Inc., 224 pages, $22

Christine Schutt writes of a private girls school in New York City. She writes of the senior class. One of them is in the hospital with cancer. The others come to see her, fitting in their visits between classes, tests and college applications. The healthy ones manage to remember Astra. Often she sleeps through their visits.

"All Souls" manages to make meaningful the superficiality of the lives of rich high school females. We pity the awkward ones. We pity the ones whose fathers left. But we are also intrigued by the ones who seem fine.

Two of Schutt's minor characters are inseparable. Or they will be, until one of them gets early acceptance to Harvard. Schutt describes them:

"They stood on the landing to the fifth floor and discussed what distinguished them, Alex and Suki, from people like Lisa, from most of their classmates really. They were, both of them, naturally thin. Thin to begin with.

"Absolutely no cellulite, Alex." They were distinguished by their slender bodies and their disregard for their bodies, their purebred bone structure, their incongruously elegant good looks, also their money, their snobbery, their wayward society swagger."

Schutt, herself, teaches in New York City. She's written short stories and a novel that was a finalist for the National Book Award.

With "All Souls" she's written less of a "Great Gatsby" exploration of class and money and more of an exploration of the defining year of a person's life.

Car, the sick girl's best friend, can't help caring about her own problems, when she talks to Astra. At one point in the novel, Car realizes: " ... how weird it was that she, Car, who smoked and drank, was healthy while her best friend was sick. Good could be wrung from dwelling on Astra. Comparatives were meaningful."

Car is correct, comparatives are meaningful. Or at least they are when they are deftly drawn, as in "All Souls."

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