Or maybe, this week, that would seem like the theme of anything I read, as the book whose chapters I've been alternating with those of The English Patient is the Tenth Anniversary Report of my college class, compiled in anticipation of our Reunion in June. Do all colleges do these? Probably Harvard is more inclined to this sort of obsessive tracking of its graduates than most colleges, and probably its graduates are more inclined than most to track each other. The Report, arguably misnamed, as "report" implies some amount of analysis, which you actually have to supply yourself, is simply a list of all the members of the class of 1989, with as complete contact information for each of us as the alumni office has been able to elicit, and short descriptions, from those who volunteered them, of how they've accounted for themselves since we were last assembled. About a third of the class, by my quick rough estimate, sent in these brief self-portraits, each, obviously, without seeing what everybody else was writing, and the collection of them is striking in a number of ways. First, and I guess I'd have expected this if I'd thought about it, an enormous number of the bios could have been extruded from a single Mad Lib: "Has it really been ten years since we shook hands under [Harvard landmark] and headed our separate ways?! In some ways it feels like forever, and in some ways it feels like no time at all! After graduation, I spent three [units of time] [traveling/working/imprisoned] in [foreign country about whose medieval politics you once took a survey course]. That was a wonderful experience, but eventually I returned to [New York/LA/Boston/your hometown] and embarked on an equally exciting adventure as a [lawyer/doctor/graduate student] at [apparently-prestigious firm/hospital/college]. The work is hard, but to my surprise, I love my job! Who would have thought?! In [year] I married my lovely [husband/wife] [spouse's name], whose is truly the best thing that ever happened to me. Until the arrival of our first lovely [child/pet], [child/pet's name], who is the joy and focus of our lives! [He/She/It] is a constant source of wonder. Being a [parent/pet-owner] is exhausting, but incredibly satisfying. We'd love to hear from any 89'ers passing through [not-at-all-exotic location where you now live]. See you at the reunion!"

This is, of course, an eminently reasonable outline of a life, and surveys like these self-select for people whose lives can be summarized this way. By the time I slogged through the fiftieth minor variation on it, though, it had started to depress me. Far too many interesting people became lawyers, for one, but the tone of these stories exhausts me more than the events and choices they share. Too many facts and names, like a timeline crumpled up into a paragraph to save printing costs, not nearly enough reflection. What kind of person looks back on ten years and doesn't try to figure out what it meant? Too many stories culminate in children with a gasp of relief, like the protagonists have been excused from finding any other direction for their lives. Why, for this of all audiences, blanch out the interesting failures and the hard lessons through which all these people almost assuredly lived? Oh, I know why, I guess, but I wanted us to be above competitiveness and stuffy pride. I wanted this report to be our collaborative ledger of what truths we've discovered, fanned out into the world for a decade, but instead much of it reads like people are answering the implicit questions "Are you keeping up?" or, even more defensively, "Was selling out so bad, after all?" And so the entries that thrill me, and I laughed and grinned at this book as much anything else I've read in recent memory, are the ones that do show sparks of awareness and individuality: aspiring writers demanding that classmates with publishing connections give them a call; my college girlfriend's deadpan announcement of her (fictional, thankfully) sex change; somebody explaining, in frankly excessive detail, how they have overcome their reluctance, due to having webbed toes, to wear sandals in public; a once-close friend I haven't talked to since graduation eschewing biography entirely, and instead sending in an excerpt from what appears to be the imagined context of some painting I can't place; a couple cheerful wackos; a few people donating some of their own word-space to the memory of a classmate who recently died. Ten years out of college, I regard my life as underway, but fundamentally unresolved, so naturally I gravitate towards other people who feel this way, feel it strongly enough to think that any report which didn't acknowledge their doubts would be false and worthless. I am interested in this reunion not for any journey it represents, in time or space (and since I never left Cambridge, and still visit Harvard Square two or three times a week, there will be no awe-struck, memories-flooding-back strolls through the campus for me), but for what we could make it mean, for each other, for what we can learn by seeing how many different paths led out from one place, and how many ways they've converged again since. People you knew ten years ago, and who knew you ten years ago, are a precious resource, even, or perhaps especially, if you haven't seen them in the meantime.

And some element of this, I'm sure, is part of why I stick, stubbornly, with every musician I ever loved too, even as they drift out of everybody else's consciousness. I don't know how many consciousnesses Then Jerico made their way into, in the first place, with their 1987 debut First (The Sound of Music) and the 1989 follow-up The Big Area, but nearly a decade away should be enough to extricate the band from most of them. Leader Mark Shaw made a solo album somewhere in the interim, which I haven't been able to find, but for Orgasmaphobia (which came out last year, but it's taken me several tries to get a copy shipped over here) he reassumes the band's name and, hearteningly, their legacy. It has become a stifling environment for grand gestures in music (for grandness of any sort, anywhere, really), but Shaw doesn't appear to have noticed. "Some People" surges to life with shiny, roaring guitars, springy bass, swirling vocal processing, twinkling synthesizers and Shaw's wonderfully flawed voice, perpetually on the verge of fraying. A cracking every-beat snare gives way to a humming, textural murmur in the yearning "All in All". The languid, wistful "Never Surrender" is like the Alarm's "Spirit of '76" revisited, now that we're older, no longer surprised that our conviction flagged, and trying to figure out how to reconcile muted adulthood with our collections of principles we keep refusing, whether they've gotten much use lately or not, to discard. "Feel You More" bounces cautiously, chime glissades a concession to pleasures for which kids are usually too impatient. The mid-album intermission "Iain Banks" is a slow synth-string meditation over which Banks reads an odd fragment about discovering language inside the split stones of a crumbling castle wall, but "Walking on Glass" is unabashed rock strut, complete with brass flourishes and more than one moment that strikes me as a compromise between INXS' slinkiness and some of the louder Roxette songs. The sampled moans on the title track seem like a lapse in judgment (although I can't think, offhand, of any song I felt was improved by simulated sex noises, so maybe this is just me), and the jittery drum-and-bass intro to "Breakdown in Paradise" threatens to be a impressively misplaced impulse, but "Breakdown in Paradise" turns out to be a glorious, unhurried dirge, halfway between the Alarm and Puressence. The dreamy, pulsing "Euphoria" is the sort of song every New Wave LP's second side used to have at least three of. A white singer saying "Be satisfied with what you have" in a song called "Brotherman" is probably dangerous, but the song is about how our own expectations often determine our fates as much as anybody else's plans for us, which seems to me like a fair and useful point, and besides, the music industry works very hard to make sure that black people don't listen to music like this. (I wish I had a clearer idea why. Who makes money from race tensions?) "Energy" sounds like it wants to break into Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but in the end never quite musters the necessary nerve. I feel a little like the whole album suffers from this last-minute failure of courage, like the scars from Then Jerico's first brief life have left Shaw reluctant to invest so much of himself in his music this time around, reticent about making these songs sound as distinctive as they could have, hoping that if he suppresses some of his youthful instincts, he'll get farther. I doubt it will work. I don't think the problem with Then Jerico was ever that they sounded too much like themselves, I think it was that music this open-hearted was only commercially viable for a short time, 1984 to 1987 or thereabouts (starting with The Unforgettable Fire and ending with The Joshua Tree, approximately), and Then Jerico missed it. It's never seemed any less vital to me, though, and with Adrian Borland's death there's one less master still willing to make it, so if I have to work a little to imagine how these songs would sound if they believed in themselves more firmly, I don't mind. If we imagine it hard enough, maybe next time they will.

Disc one contains sixteen tracks from three BBC radio sessions, covering the bulk of the band's two albums in a form not radically unlike the studio recordings. The precise relations between instruments are less carefully worked out in these performances than on the album versions, predictably, but the appeal of Then Jerico, to me, lies mostly in their audible commitment to the music, and that comes out of their hands and throats, not their devices, and so is captured here quite intact. The two versions of "Muscle Deep" are particularly instructive: when I listen to them back to back, I realize that they are quite different, the earlier one nearly unplugged in comparison to the dense atmosphere of the later version, but nine songs apart, here, I hardly notice. I could listen to nine versions of these songs, at least, without complaint.

Less dedicated listeners might run out of patience a little earlier, though, as after well over an hour of the first disc's radio sessions, the second supplies another hour of mostly the same songs, this time recorded in concert at the Hammersmith Odeon on the tour for The Big Area. The liner notes claim this is "an authentic attestation to the phenomenal live power of the band", but compared with live peers like The Sound's In the Hothouse or Runrig's Once in a Lifetime, this recording seems excessively sanitized, to me, the crowd faded up only at the very beginnings and ends of songs, so that often in the middle of songs Shaw sounds like he's been abandoned. The evident intensity of the band's performances suggests that the crowd's feedback was, in fact, electric, but the set would sound better, I think, especially paired with the audience-less radio sessions on the first disc, if we could hear their enthusiasm, instead of having to deduce it.