After Harvard, Dispatches of Adulthood THE first thing you need to know about the Red Book is that when Harvard graduates talk about it (which they do a lot), they're not talking about Mao Zedong's pamphlet of axioms. That is, they're not talking about "The Little Red Book" but about The Big One, the one that lands at five-year intervals with the thud of a Manhattan phone directory on the doorstep of everyone who has ever graduated from the college, and keeps on arriving for as long as they live, whether they want it or not, a gift from the tireless alumni association. This trance-inducing volume, a facebook that came before Facebook, consists of dispatches from graduates who have chosen to file and have evaded the terse message "last known address," "address unknown" or (it doesn't get terser) "died." The information includes the biographical basics - address, e-mail, occupation, spouse, children - and an account of their lives, often true, over the last half-decade. The tagline for Deborah Copaken Kogan's new novel, "The Red Book," sums it up: "There's the story we tell the world, and then there's the real story." Ms. Kogan's novel, which chronicles the 20th reunion of four roommates from the Class of "89, confirms what readers of the Red Book know: Once you start reading it, you can't stop. "No data exists concerning the percentage of red books that are cracked open the minute their recipients arrive home from work, the playground, an adulterous tryst, what have you," she writes, "but the author will go out on a limb here and guess 100." It's all there. The deaths of parents, spouses, classmates; the births of children; prostate cancer, depression, money made and money lost, triumphs and tailspins; oceans crossed (or swum) and mountains hiked; dodging mortar in Afghanistan; and, in a few terrible instances, the kind of family tragedies we screen from our conscious minds to get through the day. "Those are some of the great things and the sorrowful things of 62 earth rotations," writes Philip Aaberg on the very first page of the 1971 Fortieth Anniversary Report, the most recent edition. What is it about this crimson-colored book, its hue as recognizable to graduates as the coloration of a red-crested cardinal to a dedicated birder, that prompts such obsessive perusal? For one thing, the readers are also the writers; they can open these books and read about themselves and their roommates, their friends and rivals, old flames, Ping-Pong opponents, and hundreds of people they had never even heard of who shared an experience that, for many, would define their lives. But the main point is to compare, the thing we do reflexively to define our own achievements. Who's happy, who's depressed? Whose children turned out great, whose are still "finding themselves"? Who's rich, who's not? One contributor put it in simple binary terms: "Things I've done well/Things I've done poorly." It's a tough assignment, and everyone sweats over the tone. "The class report challenge is always harder than it looks," confesses Sarah Sedgwick Auchincloss, a "71 graduate, in her lyrical note. Over time I have learned to appreciate Report-speak, this sturdy, smooth-sounding overview-summary style, heavy on the graduations, grandkids, travels and accomplishments, that we all trade updates in every five years. Another graduate, Robert Charles Berring Jr., expresses the general sentiment: "I want to get it right." The hardest thing of all is to know what you actually feel. A sometimes ghastly mix of covert self-congratulation, awkward confession and wry philosophizing undercut by heavy-handed irony, Red Book prose can be an exercise in confessional self-concealment. What often emerges, after several throat-clearing paragraphs, is that life has not invariably been so good, whether the author knows it or not; and it's that feature - the truth inadvertently revealed - that makes these thick volumes so horribly fascinating. There is also much genuine happiness: fulfillment in work, long marriages, the psychic and tangible rewards of social service, but that's harder to make interesting.