‘Gossip Girl” doesn’t have much to do with the tradition of old school bildungsroman built by Knowles, Salinger, and Richard Yates — but it does have something to do with one of the best private school novels to appear in recent years.

With commendations from John Ashbery, and sentences that often demand rereading, Christine Schutt has mainly appealed to readers who don’t begrudge a prose its small risks. In “All Souls” (Harcourt, 240 pages, $22), her second novel, she makes a bid for wider appeal. Describing the small cosmos around an elite Upper East Side girls’ school, Ms. Schutt imagines — or penetrates — an exclusive world at once sexy and lamentable, predictable but still mysterious. Her subject is not any one aspect of private school culture, but its almost intangible totality, the thing that gives a school, in all its decentered complexity, an identity. Miraculously, she achieves this, and in a novel that is a model of succinctness.

Ms. Schutt teaches at Nightingale-Bamford, the school on which “Gossip Girl” is based. But “All Souls” has little in common, tonally, with the great tradition of prep school novels. Our view of the invented Miss Siddons School is a composite one; we flit through the consciousness of a dozen students, their fathers, their mothers, and a few teachers. Here, school is not something that happens to any one character, and our interest has little to do with a nostalgia for bitter experience.

Nor does “All Souls” memorialize a teacher. Ms. Schutt owes some things to “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”; though none of her student-characters are younger than the eighth grade, we do learn that many of them became friends when they were little girls, and some of Muriel Spark’s wisdom, about the way 10-year-old girls age, into late adolescence, shows up here. But Ms. Schutt does not give to her teachers the role of guide to young minds — her students are generally more worldly than their teachers.

But neither is “All Souls” an exposé, like Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Prep.” Bulimia, irresponsible parenting, and the excesses of money are part of the book’s landscape, but Ms. Schutt is not especially interested in scandal. Siddons comes out a thoroughly decent place. Its nearest comparison, in the prep-school tradition, would be Louis Auchincloss’s “Rector of Justin” — Ms. Schutt approaches Mr. Auchincloss’s gentle, knowing treatment of upper-class privilege, though unlike him she in no way signals her membership in any kind of elite. And unlike his book, or any book in the tradition, hers never has to look outside the daily run of school, fishing for some adult conflict. Sure, she does have her hook: Astra Dell, the noblest of the Siddons seniors, suffers and recovers from a rare form of cancer. But Astra’s room at Sloan-Kettering serves more as a setting, rather than a plot point, in a seamless round of narrative snatches that, covering an academic year from fall to spring, essays not the eruption of real life into the life of a school, but the simple fact of life ongoing as it includes school.

Anyone who has attended a high school with at least a scrap of institutional memory, whether public or private, will recognize Siddons. The high-intensity buzz around, say, a romance rumored between teachers, or a shift of power within the dance club, is blown away by a snowstorm of innocence at the traditional holiday assembly, when grades K through 12 close with the “12 Days of Christmas.” And then that moment fades immediately, and everyone is at home finishing their college essays, except for those who are too high on coffee to do anything but write super-solemn poems.

Critics might say that “All Souls” is lightweight, that it doesn’t develop or go anywhere. True, its themes are obvious enough: “Originality was hard to come by on Fifth Avenue,” notes Car Forestal, Astra’s best friend, the same earnest poet who drinks too much coffee. Character stereotypes are surely inevitable when writing about unformed high schoolers: but Ms. Schutt at least lets her high schoolers nod at their own inevitability. Ufia Abiola is the generally acknowledged “black princess,” and Car Forestal keeps writing even though she knows — tragically — that what she produces can only be her juvenilia.

Brief as the charm of such self-awareness may be, there’s much to commend in all that Ms. Schutt gets right. If you skip lunch, you get to have Tasti D-Lite later. If you go visit Astra, you can put it in your college essay. But more valuable than these incisive observations — and they are sympathetic, not satirical — is the total picture. What makes most efforts that promise a sweeping exploration of a lofty, complicated world ultimately feel claustrophobic is the way the panorama collapses down into the portrait of a few principals. Of course, that dynamic is also what makes them satisfying as stories. “All Souls” is notable for making the other choice: It stays panoramic. Ms. Schutt fills in a detail and then moves on. The result, while not dramatically overwhelming, moves us in other ways, offering with consummate realism a picture of how schools help constitute the fabric of the city.

blytal@nysun.com