For a novel meant to be a light, sassy romp through Yalies’ sexual exploits, “Chloe Does Yale” (Hyperion, 272 pages, $19.95) is surprisingly dull. The literary debut of Natalie Krinsky (Yale class of 2004) – who wrote an explicit sex column for the Yale Daily News, “Sex and the (Elm) City” – is part fictionalized autobiography, part collection of old columns, related through the tale of Chloe Carrington: a New York City girl who (surprise) goes to Yale and writes a provocative sex column for the Yale Daily News.

While this book may be much talked about for a few weeks, it will never be read again. In the meantime, however, it raises an interesting comparison with another recently published book, Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” In Mr. Wolfe’s novel, the college hookup culture sends the title character into a crash-and-burn of Hindenburg proportions. Although the sexcapades in “I Am Charlotte Simmons” take place at fictional Dupont University, the anecdotes both books relate – and the untold ones of date rapes, unwanted pregnancies, unwanted STDs, and emotional breakdowns – are not unique to any particular college. In fact, they’re not unique to college. They are the college-level legacy of a wider social phenomenon: a do-it-if-it-feels-good movement that begat today’s stratospheric divorce and out-of-wedlock-birth rates, epidemics of AIDS and other horrifying diseases, and one million-plus abortions a year.

Mr. Wolfe’s portrayal of today’s young women, though criticized in some quarters, rang truer to this recent Yalie than Ms. Krinsky’s own bland account – but this is also the result of poor literary execution on her part. Chloe meets stock Yale characters (the overachieving newspaper editor, the white-guilt-laden activist) and encounters stock Yale traditions (Harvard-Yale weekend, the Exotic Erotic bacchanal). So readers who didn’t attend Yale will do a lot of head-scratching, and those who did will be disappointed by “Chloe’s” inability to evoke any nostalgia whatsoever, references to Koffee Too, Toad’s, and York side notwithstanding.

The storyline, too, is not engaging, especially as Chloe’s problems are entirely of her own making. Our heroine wants to enjoy the thrills of risque behavior; when it becomes manifest that this often carries unpleasant consequences, she doesn’t want to live with them. That she has to is the novel’s great injustice to be remedied.

The problem is, that’s not an injustice at all, which makes the angst surrounding it very silly indeed. People (there are allusions to Yale’s conservative and Christian groups) are offended when, upon opening their papers over their cereal, they find a column about fellatio? Astonishing. Insofar as there are villains in “Chloe Does Yale,” they are the great unwashed who don’t find Miss Carrington hilarious. In considering the book’s greater implications, however, it’s easy to see why they don’t.

Through all the semi-naked parties, the naked parties, the pot-smoking, the keg stands, and the fumbled hookups, “Chloe Does Yale” wants to be a story about finding real love in an atmosphere saturated with sex. In one of her columns, Chloe ponders: “When was the last time you hooked up with someone who respected you, much less loved you?” But in a book whose characters are less introspective when playing at sex than they are when playing poker, is it any surprise that Chloe and her friends have a hard time getting respect from their lovers, since they seem to have so little for themselves?

They reminded me of my freshman year suitemate, who, amidst her other ambitions, just wanted to bed the right guy, a handsome fellow with long curly locks she could run her fingers through (I paraphrase). She dedicated herself to this mission as some devoted themselves to varsity sports, or organic chemistry – and, by early November, it had landed her in the Yale Psychiatric Institute. When I visited her there, she was still prattling about different guys she hoped to hook up with. She never did, I guess: She had to leave Yale permanently, and no one ever heard from her again.

Ms. Krinsky whitewashes these unsavory elements of the collegiate recreational-sex culture, and wraps up her tale at the last minute into a sophomoric, saccharine ending. But the trail of wreckage – emotional, spiritual, sometimes physical – that this behavior leaves for many is conspicuously absent. Chloe may get her happy ending, but in the real world that is not the end of the story, for Ms. Krinsky or the newly matriculating young women her book will undoubtedly attract. Insofar as its author is carrying the banner of this harmful trend, she will leave an ugly mess behind her.