The novel and two stories in The Class of '49 take us from a Portland, Oregon, high school in 1949, through such memorable way stations as the Brookley Air Base Service Club in Mobile, Alabama, and Palace Billiards in San Francisco, to Sunset Strip and a Hollywood movie lot in the late sixties.

In a sequence of short narratives the title novel portrays the triumphs and embarrassments of several students over the course of a single year. They are as different as Clyde Merriman, who "had no particular ambitions" but whose future is quickly decided when his girlfriend gets pregnant; the Maloney brothers, one the student body president, the other an outcast; Janet Salterlee, who trained for fifteen years to be Queen of the Rose Festival; Blaze Cooney, who attempts to write a novel; Anne Tressman, whose only interest is ballet; and Tommy German, the hanger-on, who tries desperately to meet girls on the seaside boardwalk—yet behind their fantasies and foibles lies a common rite of passage.

"One Pocket" traces the fascination of a writer, stuck in the air force, with the game of pool. He discovers that on occasion he can shoot "in a 'zone' way over his head," a discovery at once exhilarating and alarming. Finally, in "Glitter: A Memory," the writer, at work on a screenplay for a fading star, learns the lesson of Hollywood that things are not as they seem in a world of fantasy, deception, and calculated illusion.

Comical, lively, and tender, The Class of '49 shows Don Carpenter's voice to be one of the most vital in contemporary American writing.