NONFICTION - April 26, 1987

BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL: A DIARY OF 1964 by Bob Greene (Atheneum: $18.95; 320 pp.). “Be True to Your School,” Bob Greene’s instantly engaging diary of his junior/senior year in high school, was born out of the meticulous record he kept at the suggestion of a journalism teacher. It chronicles a year when 16-year-olds dared to drink their first beer, when lives were marked by Top Ten surveys, when being a letterman conveyed real status, when sex more often than not meant touching the outside of a girl’s blouse, when plans for folk groups fizzled (“I guess it’s because of the Beatles”).

And the joys and troubles once again are real and engrossing. It is marred in only one regard: In his effort to spin a narrative out of the “cryptic sentence fragments and disjointed conversations and hurriedly written descriptions of emotions,” the grown-up Greene is occasionally too much in evidence.

The effort to capture the authentic voice is sometimes apparent, and the diary loses a touch of its immediacy by making us aware that we are once-removed from the original impulse. Yet Greene succeeds in great measure. The events and people in this account never fail to absorb, and pace is brisk, and we are so completely pulled back into this world of innocence that we actually forget that in two or three years these same teen-agers would be in Vietnam. A delightful book, and like the song Greene cruised to that summer, fun, fun, fun.