Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever. Walter Kirn. Doubleday. 224 pages. $24.95.

Despite its sociologically tinged title, Walter Kirn's new book is a diverting memoir that has less to do with grades and standardized test scores than with a Mormon-raised farm boy's difficulty adjusting to the temptations and prejudices of an Ivy League school.

Episodically structured, Lost in the Meritocracy follows Kirn from his childhood in a small Minnesota town, a ''place of wistful rot'' he longed to escape, to his undergraduate ordeal in the 1980s at Princeton, which drove him to the brink of physical and mental collapse. A novelist and critic celebrated for his sharp satirical eye, Kirn refrains from assuming a self-pitying tone; instead he milks every drop of humor from moments of humiliation and despondency.

There are the daddy-subsidized roommates who, displeased with their suite's decor, order new furniture and then expect Kirn, on a hand to mouth budget, to pay his share. When he refuses he's banned from touching any of it; he can't even step foot on the Persian rug. But before leaving for Christmas break he exacts revenge in spectacular fashion.

Then there is the time he scored coke from a half-naked, bad-girl heiress who resided at the UN Plaza. Their all-night snortfest degenerates into the gross; while checking out a Vermeer in her apartment, Kirn mines his aggrieved nose for treasure: ''I dug in one of my nostrils with a pinkie nail and tried to dislodge a coke crumb that was hanging there, intending to crush and reuse it.'' How far this latter-day saint falls!

A Gatsby transfixed by his dreamy green light, Kirn has to be repeatedly reminded of the accuracy of his beloved Fitzgerald's saying that the rich are different from you and me. When he and a Pakistani student crash a party thrown by trust-fund babies, they are treated like a viral contaminant: ''The crowd contracted and squeezed us out in a kind of collective immune response'' The women are strictly off limits: ``Our shape-shifting, agile, approval-seeking brains may have entitled us to live and study with the children of the ruling class, but not to mate with them.''

But really, was it so bad? He went to Princeton, for God's sake! How many inner-city kids would put up with being snubbed for such a chance? And for all the boo-boos inflicted upon him, he still managed to have fun. He made friends, enjoyed a goodly quantity of sex and academically acquitted himself well enough to be tapped for a post-graduate fellowship to Oxford, a 1,000-year-old university located in a class-obsessed country where snobbery has been elevated to an art form. Talk about leaping from the frying pan into the fire.

Ariel Gonzalez teaches English at Miami Dade College.

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