I am Charlotte Simmons | Folio | TinyCat |

2024-04-18 8:28 pm

I am Charlotte Simmons

by Tom Wolfe

Hardcover, 2004

Status

Available

Tags

Genres

General Fiction

Publication

New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004.

Description

2005 Audie Award FinalistAmerica's "peerless observer" ("People") uncovers college life--from jocks to mutants, dormcest to tailgating--plus race, class, sex, and basketball Dupont University--the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition...Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina, who has come here on full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turn of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock- obsessed campus--she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s." I Am Charlotte Simmons" is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.… (more)

Media reviews

The New York Review of Books

A failure it is: bloated, schematic, heavy-handed, and, it must be said, boring; impotent in its attempts to suggest a lived reality... and, oddest of all, flaccid as social satire.

— 8 more

Entertainment Weekly

It would be logical to speculate on the psychological connections between the refined 73-year-old author of this strikingly out-of-touch bildungsroman (college kids get drunk! They hook up!) and a bright, well-read, exceedingly pretty, and preposterously dainty fictional lass who is regularly

shocked by every cussword she hears uttered by the more affluent boors who share the groves of academe with her.

The Washington Post

At fictional Dupont University, every guy wants to be thought a "player" (or, as Wolfe spells it, "playa"), and nearly all the undergraduate women hope to be no better than sluts. Behind those ivied walls, our daughters gladly squirm out of their low-cut jeans to rut with shameless abandon, while

our sons treat their one-night stands as conquests and whores.

Wall Street Journal

Charlotte came to Dupont not for sex but to learn. Like Harvard, Dupontis harder to get into than to stay at, but Charlotte has trouble with her grades. Her shame over sex gets in the way of the exercise of her mind. Somehow the two must be brought into harmony in what Mr. Wolfe calls her soul. She

takes courses, however, in biology and neuroscience in which the professor speaks only of "the soul," in dismissive quotation marks. Perhapsthis is why our universities and our society are unable to identifymanliness or see how women and men relate to it. Manliness is a form ofunreason that science tries to explain away, and it takes a novelist to seethe reason in the unreason of manliness.

Christian Science Monitor

The problem isn't really the inclusion of so many cliché characters; sadly, there are plenty of real students who fall into these categories. What's galling about this novel is its persistent lack of nuance, its reduction of the whole spectrum of people on a college campus to these garish primary

colors.

The result is a disappointingly empty novel -- a novel that feels as if its author were merely going through the motions instead of really trying to capture the raucous carnival of American life.

The education of Charlotte Simmons turns into a melodrama that could be subtitled Why Smart Girls Do Dumb Things for Bad Boyfriends.

Wolfe has always been more surface than depth, which is why other novelists of his generation (Mailer, Updike, John Irving) have dismissed him as a mere journalist. But at best he is a brilliant caricaturist, and the more America has become a self-caricature the more we've turned to him for

instruction as well as entertainment. With I Am Charlotte Simmons, though, he tells us little or nothing we didn't already know. In a week of disappointment, here is one more.

But what Wolfe has come up with in this book (in bookstores today) is a terrific (if frequently depressing) coming-of-age story, with a protagonist unlike any of his previous characters.

User reviews

LibraryThing member Voracious_Reader

The book indicts American higher education as being shallow, booze-filled, purposeless, and filled with immorality, detailing the corruption of an intelligent, naive girl. The story is well-considered and mature. Its characters were well-developed, and they behaved in internally consistent ways.

It's a little like a tragedy. Wolfe stretches all that is normally small into bigger and bigger proportions. The main character experiences a spiritual crisis and is both victim and perpetrator of cultural snobbery, i.e., morality is simply for the little people who fail to understand the complexities that are innate to human nature. She likes the guy she shouldn't. She can't like her intellectual equal. She gets hurt, so on and so forth, but the story isn't as clichéd as I make it sound. It's fleshy and new, interesting.

In the end, the novel is multi-layered. It's about higher education, but it's also simply about one girl (I don't say woman, because she isn't one) being startled by the absence of morality at her ivy league school. It's about the brilliance of a star growing dim. She cannot achieve without being constantly admired, so she settles for being liked instead of being good. She lacks moral judgement and courage.

Thumbs up from me. If you can stomach the copious amounts of sex, drinking, poor English, disrespect for all things beautiful, and general debauchery, then give it a go.

By the way, right now I don't feel like being all political and editorializing about the current lack of educating that goes on in schools but--I shall just say--it's not a baseless indictment.

LibraryThing member stephmo

I got to the point in this book where I was so far into it, I was finishing it out of sheer spite. I refused to let the simple story of a girl that could not possibly exist going through the most impossible of self-inflicted problems get the best of me. I fully accept that this accomplishment, much

like the tale of Charlotte Simmons, really means nothing.

Know what's interesting? I listened to this on audiobook and at the very end there is a brief interview with Tom Wolfe. At one point, he's asked if he created Charlotte as an answer to the criticism that he has all but ignored women in his writing. He had an answer that went on about how he hadn't set out to do it on purpose but that he found Charlotte so compelling as a character and he really wanted to find out what happened to her.

So who is this Charlotte that is so compelling that Wolfe had to write about her? On the surface I suppose she's an intellectually stimulating virgin saving herself for marriage with no patience for those morally inferior to her but prepared to mother inferior men into superior versions of themselves. She gets to Dupont despite her inferior economic class, her lack of opportunity and her failure to have everything handed to her on a platter. She's come to college to experience intellectual pursuit only to discover that all potential women friends are simple, slutty, guttermouth girls and while all men seemingly fall at her feet, they're unworthy of Charlotte's attention due to their morally inferior character.

While making Charlotte an object of conquest to three men (a starter on the basketball team, a major player in the biggest fraternity on campus and the token smart boy with a chip on his shoulder), Wolfe also makes it clear that no woman will be her true friend. Charlotte quickly alienates her roommate and makes no real attempt to create a social circle for herself outside of two hangers-on that merely get her to our fraternity guy. It really is this dull, and yet Charlotte seems to take great glee in this lack of friendship as a badge of honor. After all, why be friends with those who are morally inferior to you?

Of course, she does have the guys that are constantly after her and her and her morally superior ways. And why exactly do these guys stick around after the first few conversations? She has nothing in common with these men (well, virginity with one of them and she likes him least), she is clueless about popular culture, her ability to empathize is non-existent, she has no discernible hobbies and she can't even accept a simple invitation to lunch without being completely annoyed. I can understand the equally social-awkward guy who complains constantly about his virginity putting up with some of this behavior for a prolonged period - but the player in the fraternity (even as a conquest?) or the starter on the basketball team? With no real kindness that comes from Charlotte ever - with no moment where she even remotely lets up or has a moment of fun that isn't her gushing about her being superior to others simply trying to fit in, why am I to care if this girl from a small mountain town really makes it as arm candy?

Then again, it's Wolfe's fantasy and not mine.

LibraryThing member ChicGeekGirl21

I don't know why Tom Wolfe assumed he knew anything about young college women, but he clearly doesn't. This book is juicy in some areas, but ultimately irritating due to Wolfe's total lack of knowledge about the modern college experience. Yes! Roommates sometimes "sexile" you--big whoop! And in

real life, naive, deeply religious Charlotte could join a Christian group on campus and be with her own kind instead of becoming a total outcast. These kind of details are passed over for the more "entertaining" plot of having the titular Charlotte Simmons *gasp* lose her virginity to a dumb preppy asshole. Horrors!

LibraryThing member dudara

It seems odd that Tom Wolfe, would attempt to write the college story from a female perspective. However, his daughters have recently graduated from college so I suppose he was inspired by their stories. He seems to have gotten inside the female mind to a reasonable degree but there are nuances

that he just doesn't seem to have gotten.

Charlotte Simmons, the eponymous heroine is from Sparta, North Carolina, an american small town. As class valedictorian and academic superstar, she is expected to go far, and is due to attend Ivy League Dupont university. She expects to meet her intellectual equals at Dupont, something which has eluded her so far in Sparta. However, she is disappointed to find that students are Dupont appear to be more obsessed with drinking, partying, making out and sports, than they appear to be with studying. Wolfe also highlights the importance of sports teams to the american university system.

The story in not told solely from the perspective of Charlotte Simmons. We also meet frat boy king Hoyt Thorpe who is determined to be remembered as a legend within his frat house and white basketball star Jojo Johansson who undergoes a seachange in his attitude to his studies.

I mainly like the character of Charlotte Simmons, though I did find her a little sanctimonius and overly naive at times. However, her growing attempts to fit in and be seen as popular will reverbate with lots of readers. The most endearing character in the book, as far as I'm concerned is Johansson, who is determine to move beyond the jock athlete stereotype.

The book is quite long, but it literally zips by due to Wolfe's pacy writing and I never once found it a chore. Critics of the book have said that it does not accurately reflect college life but I never once felt that it over exaggerating. It's a whirlwind tour of the college experience, but its a remarkable acheivement for a male writer to capture a female mind so well.

LibraryThing member Kayla-Marie

Sara Nelson (author of So Many Books, So Little Time) says that you should read books that take place in settings completely different from where you are. If you are visiting your grandparents in Palm Desert, you should bring Smilla’s Sense of Snow with you in order to transport yourself away

from the arid desert and into a winter wonderland. If you are back home for Thanksgiving Break you should pick up The Crimson Petal and the White so that for a moment you are living in nineteenth century England among noblemen and prostitutes. I am all for this theory of good book reading, but there is something to be said about reading what you know. I enjoy reading books about people and places I feel familiar with.

That is why when I first came to Mount Holyoke College I craved books of the college genre; one book in particular. I could not seem to get my mind off of the Tom Wolfe novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, which I had read in high school. I felt close to the title character Charlotte because we were both North Carolina girls from the foothills attending a New England college and attempting to carve out a successful future for ourselves.

During my first couple of weeks at Mount Holyoke every new college experience I had (i.e. unpacking my things in my new dorm, using the communal bathroom, eating in the dining hall) caused my thoughts to turn toward similar scenes in Charlotte Simmons. Each day, my preoccupation with the book got worse and worse until I finally reached a point where I thought enough was enough, and so I walked to the college library to check out the Tom Wolfe novel and began reading it for the second time. It was better than the first time. I could actually relate to Charlotte so much more this time around as a first-year college student trying to adjust to college life. I would read the scene of her unpacking her things in her dorm on the fifth floor and it would strike me that I was also living on the fifth floor of my dorm. I would read about Charlotte’s first time using the coed bathroom (the disgusting scene where two boys are on the toilet making crude bowel noises and boasting about it) and I would suddenly feel very grateful that I had decided to go to a women’s college. In scene after scene, chapter after chapter, I experienced a sense of familiarity that was a blessing to have during that time when I was trying to adjust to new surroundings.

I will never grow tired of I Am Charlotte Simmons.

LibraryThing member browner56

I really wanted to enjoy this novel because I've been a big fan of Tom Wolfe's writing for a long time. In fact, "Bonfire of the Vanities" remains one of my favorite books; I worked on Wall Street during the 1980s and he absolutely nailed the air of hubris and self-absorption that pervaded the time

and place. Similarly, I found "A Man in Full" to be a really perceptive fictional treatment of life in the 1990s. Unfortunately, Wolfe misses badly with this expose of college life in the new millennium.

I had two main problems with this novel. First, while still a keen observer of social interactions, the author's "big picture" insights are hardly bold or new. Basically, Wolfe builds his story around the following observations: (1) college students like to drink and have sex, (2) student bodies are stratified along economic, racial, and class lines, (3) most college athletes aren't particularly good students, and (4) sometimes professors act out of self-interest. Perhaps I'm too familiar with the subject--I teach at a university somewhat similar to the one described in the book--but I suspect that anyone who has ever been to college will not be shocked or entertained by these revelations.

My second problem with the world Wolfe creates is that not one of the characters is remotely likeable or even particularly interesting. As other readers have noted, Charlotte is portrayed as naïve to the point of being unbelievable. More fundamentally, though, the way she turns her back on everything and everyone she stands for in the span of a few short months makes her very hard to root for. Most of the others--JoJo, Hoyt, Beverly, Adam--are one-dimensional and come off as mere cartoons. Sadly, after finishing the book, I couldn't think of a single character whose story was compelling enough to redeem the experience of having slogged through almost 700 pages.

I'm still a fan of Tom Wolfe, but after this book I won't automatically buy and read his next one.

LibraryThing member PointedPundit

He is Back, Better than Ever
This book was a long time coming. Tom Wolfe’s battle with depression is over. He is back. And this book is his best.

Let there be no doubt. I love reading Tom Wolfe’s books. He is always showing us something we have not quite appreciated. In each book he creates a

memorable scene. Who can forget the “out came the dress uniforms” refrain in The Right Stuff; or how about the Masters of the Universe ramping the bond offering in The Bonfire of the Vanities? And then there is Chapter 4 – the visit to the work-out committee – in A Man in Full, one of the funniest chapters I have ever read.

This book includes several. There is the f**k and s**t patois, the shared bathroom in the co-ed dorm, the pre-season basketball scrimmage before 10,000 fans, the football tailgate, the fraternity formal and the frat house mixer. That a 74 year-old writer grasps the intricacies and nuances of the college youth culture is a tribute to his talent. While I would love to know the origin of his amicus towards Lacrosse players, there is no question he spans the chasm of generations to capture the college life.

This book may have been a long time coming, but here is one reader who prays Wolfe has one or two more books left in him.

LibraryThing member AnnB2013

It's a Tom Wolf novel, which these days means insightful and funny at times, and way too long.

LibraryThing member Capnrandm

As overwrought as this book is, it contains exciting glimpses of the modern college experience. Despite the fundementally unappealing portrayl, I felt proud to point out the parts of my "glory days" that I recognized on the page. Perhaps even more poignant were the glimpses of the painful trial by

fire each of our "little pond" personas had to go through when tested against the anonymity and hive-mind of college.

LibraryThing member nivramkoorb

I was very disappointed in this book. I enjoyed his 2 other novels very much, but this book was full of cliched characters that had no depth to them. There was really no plot and the main character was was totally flat and boring. Her problems were all self inflicted. I also felt that Tom Wolfe

wrote about a subject matter(college life) that would be better done by someone who was more familiar and closer to the situation. As others have mentioned, I will no longer automatically read something because it was written by Tom Wolfe. I gave it 2 stars because it was at least easy to read but I would not recommend it.

LibraryThing member Narshkite

I had the book sitting in my towering TBR pile for years, picked it up several times before, and never made it past the first 50 or so pages. I have unfair expectations for Tom Wolfe; I assumed that as with all of his other books "Charlotte" would suck me inside the author's head the moment I

started reading. It did not. I finally decided it was time to donate the book or read the darn thing through, and so I soldiered on. Turned out, this is as engrossing a read as Wolfe's other books after the first 100 pages. So...only 3 stars? Well, yes. At the end of the day I was surprised at how little Wolfe understood the people he wrote about or the world they live in. Worse, there was not a single vaguely appealing charcter to be found. The best that could be said about any is that they were, at times, pathetic. Satire doesn't work without a single relatable character, and as reportage or editorial this simply fails.

I was scanning reviews on another site, and one of the positive reviews started with "you have to love Charlotte." Perhaps that is true, but I can't imagine anyone loving Charlotte in the least. She is an insufferable utterly humorless prig, who clearly believes understanding anything about popular culture is beneath her notice and that made her destruction satisfying. Given the general availability of things like television and the internet in the time covered here (even in the South Mr. Wolfe!) she would need to make a choice to be so utterly naive upon her arrival at college. And even assuming she was raised Amish or in some sort of anti-technology cult (which does not appear to be the case) she should have been able to catch up a bit when she reached civilization. Yet she has no interest in learning or adapting, simply in judging (herself and others) and wondering why everyone else is so awful. When lonliness or awkwardness finally knocks at her door rather than learning (her intellect is purported to be exceptional, and all things can be learned) she chooses magical thinking and abdandonment of self over simple observation and thoughtful modification. In our protaganist I wanted to find Alice, or Gulliver, or Hank Morgan. What I got was an sour combination of Cotton Mather, Gladys Kravitz and Fanny Price. She is not believable, she is not likable, she is not relatable. I suspect she is Tom Wolfe -- I hope not, but if so count him on my list of people with whom I never want to hang out.

Things don't really improve when one moves on from looking at just Charlotte. I am not of the generation portrayed here. I received my undergradute degree in 1984 and completed my graduate work in 1989 so it has been over 20 years since I lived on campus. The endless drinking, the random sex, the confusion between sophistication and ennui, the anti-intellectual zeitgest -- that is EXACTLY what college was like in 1980. Actually, forget 1980 -- it could be 1960. This is like "Animal House," with Doug Niedermeyer in drag front and center. Actually, make that 1950 since I imagine these charcters would work as a prequel to the wonderful "Bonfire of the Vanities". ("Kindling the Bonfire: The College Years!") Maybe I am lowbrow, but I'll take Blutarsky over Niedermeyer any day. Both are going to hell, but only one is making the trip fun. If Mr. Wolfe was interested in focusing a lens on the millenial generation, he needed some much fresher research and keener observations.

I don't really know how to wrap this up: I enjoyed reading the book, perhaps in part because I found so much of it objectionable, and in part because dude knows his prose. As social commentary, or allegory though, it failed spectacularly

LibraryThing member PennyAnne

I love Tom Wolfe - "Bonfire of the Vanities" is one of my all time favourite books. But while I enjoyed the literary play in Charlotte Simmons and found it amazing that a 70 year old male could write from the perspective of an 18 year old girl I was, in the end, not convinced by storyline.

Charlotte is so unbelievably naive, pure and morally superior and yet within the space of one year she seems to have sold her soul to the devil, more interested in being seen to be the girlfriend of the hot basketball star than she is in the "life of the mind" which she was so excited about when starting University. The end of the book grated on me as much as the end of the movie Grease where Sandy gives up on all her pure and inocent ways and becomes the same as all the other girls so she can get the cool boy. Read this book to enjoy the way it is written but don't read it if you want more than a one-dimensional view of the behaviour of the privileged youth of today.

LibraryThing member ben_a

Not as successful as Bonfire of the Vanities, but to my mind, at least, an better book than Man in Full. It's Wolfe, so you know what you're getting: pyrotechnics and keen observation rather than approved minimalism, or high prose style. The critics who have gone after Wolfe for poor reportage are

wrong one two counts: first, he's more-or-less accurate; second, such exagerations as exist are in the service of the plot. Wolfe, as usual, conceals a novel of ideas beneath his meticulous realism. And such omissions of reportage he does commit are to heighten the protagonist's isolation, to deny her any counsel, support, or resource in the face of Dupont University's cultural maelstrom. But as this is the contrast he's exploring, it's hard to fault him for that.

I should add that the scenes of social awkwardness are absolutely excruciating. If, like me, you find humiliation harder to stomach than violence, this is at times an agonizing read.

LibraryThing member bruneau

Naive Charlotte, delighted to escape her hillbilly world on a scholarship to a prestigious private university, sees her ideals collapse when discovering the moronic, privileged world of spoiled rich kids.

Enjoyable, but sure to offend some (for many possible reasons). Also possibly annoying are the

repetitive, staccato-style, incoherent, rambling thoughts of many clueless and bewildered characters, which makes the book wordy.

Clichés? Maybe. But, then again, there's only a thin line between fiction and reality sometimes...

LibraryThing member lieslmayerson

Not the most flattering picture of Duke, but I can definitely picture the different characters and types. Wolfe does a great job of creating a relatively unlikeable and simultaneously pitiable lead character. An uncomfortable read at parts, but that is just a credit to it being written well. I

would recommend this book to a limited audience on an individual basis, but would be very interested in finding out what others from the Duke community thought of this book.

LibraryThing member eheleneb3

This was the first Tom Wolfe book that I've read. I was really, really impressed with it. If you can get past the squeamishness you feel when he discusses frat parties and college girls's skipmy attire and anatomy, there is a major social commentary on the American collegian's lifestyle and morals

here. It's a bit hard to swallow as a young person, a person who is still so close to being one of those blase, self-indulgent collegians, but I felt that it was such a true picture of what modern college life is like. This is an important book for anyone to read--college student, college graduate or parent of a college-aged kid. Very illuminating.

LibraryThing member ashergabbay

This book is about the corruption of a young American girl from Sparta, a remote mountain town in North Carolina, who makes it against all odds to a top university in Pennsylvania ("Dupont"), only to find out that not top-notch education but rather sex, alcohol, drugs and generlly being "cool" are

top-most on her fellow students' minds. Tom Wolfe paints a vivid picture of college life on American campuses, or at least that's what he would have us believe, not too successfully in my mind.

I guess Wolfe was out to write the definitive book about college life. And indeed the book is nothing but a long (700+ pages) description of the frivolities of college students. It is full of stereotypical characters: the basketball players who get academic discounts and lead a life (literally) above the rest, the drunken frat boys and the giggly sorority girls, the group of smart nerds who are after the Rhodes scholarship and, above all, the innocent hillybilly who cannot believe it all - Charlotte. Wolfe, in his charcteristic style, does not leave much to the imagination when describing Charlotte's encounter with college life. One of ther first experiences on campus are the sounds produced by a boy defecating loudly in the stalls of the co-ed bathroom (I will spare you the details). Shortly thereafter, Charlotte's room-mate throws her out in the middle of the night so that she can spend time there alone with her boyfriend; thus Charlotte learns what it means to be "sexiled". And so on and so forth.

Despite its weakness in credibility - I refuse to believe this is what life in Ivy League colleges is all about - what saves this book is Wolfe's excellent writing style, captivating the reader and transporting him to a world that although removed from reality seems at the same time very realistic. I read the book while travelling between three continents and it was a faithful companion on the long flights and sleepless nights. As far as pop fiction goes, it's an entertaining read.

One final thought. Wolfe, author of excellent books such as Bonfire of Vanities and A Man in Full, gives thanks in the foreward to the book to his daughters, who apparently let him into the secret lives of college students based on first-hand experiences. If I am Charlotte Simmons faithfully portrays what Wolfe's daughters went through in college, I shudder to think how he reacted, as a father, when hearing their stories.

LibraryThing member tikilights

Great book because it is pretty close to what is happening on campuses in this country. I'm a 20 year old college student, and a lot of the problems with crazed political teachers, team-worshiping, transparent friends, and frat houses are dead-on. I know from my own experience and the culture I

grew up in that her Charlotte's sheltered life is real in certain places in this country. Except for the seemingly endless descriptions of buildings and their architecture and also the somewhat flat ending of dead emotions, I truly enjoyed this book.
(And president Bush enjoying it and recommending it to friends solidifies my rating of 5 stars) :)

LibraryThing member kpwerker

I'm really surprised by how much I like this book. Throughout much of my reading of it, I was struck by how bang-on Wolfe's portrayal of college life (*cough* partying, hooking up, pressure to fit in) is, while at the same time finding his frankness about teenage sex to be... creepy coming from the

guy whose massive author photo graces the back cover of the book, and makes him out to be a formally well-dressed old guy. In the end my only gripe is that no one I know - of any age - actually thinks of, let alone refers to routinely , "loins." No matter how hard I tried, it just didn't strike me as being from Charlotte's perspective that the references were made.

The reason I'm surprised by how much I like the book is that I felt ambivalent about it for the first half. Maybe it took that long to get Wolfe's author photo out of my head. Regardless, I related to the book, I related to the characters, and after I finished it I'm left thinking about them and the events of the book. That's the biggest surprise of all to me: I care enough about the characters to think hard about what motivates them, how they changed over the course of the novel, and what they might end up doing down the line.

For a book that was recommended to me as "well-written trash," I must say I think it's even a little deeper than that.

LibraryThing member jkhertog111

Funny book with intellectual power behind it that makes it more than just a good read. The trademark style that makes Wolfe a delight to read is here, even if it's a little watered down compared to his other books. He does capture what college is like in this highly politicized age.

His command of

accents
The use of fictional song lyrics
The physical descriptions of people and dress and attitudes

Not nearly as funny as Electric Cool Aid Acid Test, but it shows that the old man still has command over his talent.

This book, incidentally, got lousy reviews from the "serious" book reviewers, and I think I read that it didn't sell nearly as many copies as its publisher had hoped. But frankly, I try to read everything of his I can get. He's never boring.

LibraryThing member name99

Tom Wolfe likes to write novels that describe the entire contemporary American scene, and he did a good and amusing job with both Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full.
This latest work is rather more problematic. It's sometimes amusing, and sometimes a page turner, but it also feels like a 65

year old man complaining about how everything sucks these days, how the kids have no respect, today's god-awful music, how everything is now too complicated and so on.
I don't know if it's that he isn't, at root, really interested in the lives of students, or if he has just let his misanthropy run wild, but the book feels false in so many details, and when the details one is sure of feel false, one's natural inclination is to doubt the veracity of the rest of the book. Meanwhile, at the end of the day the main thing a book like this has going for it is its claim to be an accurate portrait of America.

Details I felt rang false included:

* The descriptions of technology. Tech devices (computers, digital music players, cell phones) are constantly portraited as these alien artifacts. We are expected to believe that Charlotte is startled by a phone menu. We have Charlotte being afraid to make long distance calls because they are so expensive. We never have casual reference to the realities of student tech like utilizing a laptop to access library catalogs, or instant messaging, or email. This is tech as seen by a technophobic old man, not tech as seen by students.

* Charlotte is supposed to be a genius, but Wolfe seems quite uninterested in exactly where her genius lies. It's not in a science field, but now we are expected to believe that a genius in the humanities nonetheless has no idea of contemporary American culture or, for that matter, the perennial human condition of trying to figure out oneself and the opposite sex. (Sure she is supposedly taking a neuroscience course, but in Wolfe's description neuroscience appears to be a blend of philosophy, history, and literature; certainly not, god forbid, a science with math and chemistry and physics and suchlike.)

* Wolfe is quite happy to scold us on how awful it is that students feel compfortable with sex (and even worse, that some of them feel comfortable being gay), but appears uninterested in ever asking what these students think, or for that matter, quite why he feels so discomforted by them. Rather than taking the fact that they are so much less hung up on sex than he is as an interesting fact and riffing off that, all we hear is the standard story of how awful it is that the new generation thinks differently about these matters than he does. And Charlotte, being his alter ego, comes across as a much less interesting, and much less pleasant person, for being so dogmatic about something for no reason.

Towards the last third of the book, he becomes quite hysterical about this, like he's channeling Paul of Tarsus or something, going on and on about animal urges, how disgusting the human body is and so on.
With respect to Charlotte's story, for example, he could have justified the point he is trying to make through arguments about how we all feel a tension between our long term and our immediate desires, and that society would do well to teach us how to resist short term urges that work against our long term goals. But all we get is this inane ranting about the evils of the flesh.

* DuPont seems populated by a small fraction of hypersexed lookers and athletes, and a large population of everyone else. The everyone elses make occasional appearances as lonely lookers on at parties, as people sitting in corridors watching others go by, but Wolfe is uninterested in them. At the end of the day, it's not at all clear what he's after. One way or another, he indicates that the 90% of DuPont that aren't beautiful are both leading standard university lives (with lots of studying and small amounts of sex and partying), and that they're not worthy of serious interest. What he cares about is the fact that the beautiful people are behaving like beautiful people, something he finds terribly upsetting.

At the end of the day, I find the morality of the book horrifying. Wolfe's primary concern is that casual sex is evil. Manipulating people's emotions, or faking a committed relationship are rather less wicked. People drinking destructively is even less of a problem. And, at the very bottom of the totem pole in importance are issues like the structure of a social system that possesses a very obvious aristocracy whose children can behave like idiots at frat houses and not have others criticize them.

LibraryThing member daizylee

I bought it because I liked the cover. And because I'd heard so many disparaging reviews I had to see for myself. But I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. Definitely has its faults but also has some really wonderful moments. And as a reader, Wolfe is like a big meal, always satisfying and full.

LibraryThing member bettyjo

I graduated from a class of 22 students in rural Louisiana... LSU was my Depont...no gothic spires but red tiled roofs all over campus. Would do it again but glad it was in the 80's...I did not get sexiled.

LibraryThing member C.Vick

I think if I hadn't been listening to this novel on CD, I never would have finished it. The pace is excruciatingly slow. The story, however, was fairly interesting and compelling -- at least enough that since my reading was passive and occurring while driving, I didn't feel the need to switch it

off.

What everyone tends to marvel over is how well Tom Wolfe, an old man, writes Charlotte, a young girl. Well, most of those people probably aren't young college girls either. He does a fairly good job of portraying the macro-experience of college life, but he never adequately manages to motivate Charlotte, or explain her reactions.

Perhaps the worst thing about his book is the language. I'm no prude, and certainly heard and sometimes used that kind of language on my college campus, but since I was listening to it in my car, I never knew when I was going to be stopped at a light with my windows down, and have a character let out a string of obscenities that made me worry how much the car next to me could hear.

I don't think I'd read it again, but neither do I hugely regret having listened to it. Kinda wishy-washy, I know, but that is really the best I can do!

LibraryThing member adzebill

Read this mostly because it is indeed a cartoon version of Duke, where I spent the last 8 years. Far too long; could easily lose a few hundred pages of repetition, little lectures crammed in sideways, and endless handwringing internal monologues. It's also overstuffed with Wolfe's research, which

he doesn't seem to get quite right; I never heard folks from North Carolina talk like that, and his internet and Darwinism and neurobiology is wrong, so I gues I have to be suspicious of his portrayal of the world of undergrads. A bunch of strange tics as well; loamy loins, winking navels, and an obsession with using technical anotomical labels for bits of people. There's a plot upon which all this research is hung, but the book is really Wolfe's disapproval with the callow youth of today. None of the characters really ring true; the sleazy-beyond-description frat boys, the earnest basketball player who discovers the life of the mind, the self-important intellectual undergrads (their long passages of supposed scholarly debate were almost impossible to wade through), and especially the hopelessly naive protagonist and her moral fall. (I actually slightly prefer her post-Fall, but I'n not sure that's Wolfe's intent.) There's supposed to be a tie-in with neuroscience and peer pressure, but I coldn't make it work. Wolfe wants to write the Dickensian Social Novel (indeed, Dickens and Zola both get shout-outs), but his righteousness and research hobbyhorses have started getting in the way. I loved Bonfire of the Vanities, thought A Man In Full was OK, but won't be rereading this one. Each of the three books ends with a epilogue wrapping up loose ends; Bonfire's is delicious and bleak, Man in Full's is just odd, but this one strives for a Big Insight and fails I think.

Subjects

College stories

Difference (Psychology) Fiction

Race relations Fiction

Social classes Fiction

Women college students Fiction

Young women Fiction

Awards

Audie Award (Finalist — 2005)

The Morning News Tournament of Books (Quarterfinalist — 2005)

Bad Sex in Fiction Award (Winner — 2004)

100 best novels of the 21st century according to Afisha magazine

Language

Barcode

7815

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