I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel

Way too long for the storyline, and way too wordy. It was almost as if Tom Wolfe was hoping for us to see how knowledgeable he was about certain subjects; hence, he chose the collegiate atmosphere in order to show this! Definitely not my favorite Tom Wolfe novel.

As others have pointed out, this thing is little more than a list of cliches, caricatures, and a long extended attempt to be cool. The real trouble is how unbelievable and sloppily executed it really is.

From not knowing how college basketball is really played (in October? in quarters? Uh, not really), to a main character whose academic brilliance collides with unbelievable social ignorance, to a plot device (oh no! they're going to mail my grades to my parents!) that violates current federal law, Wolfe massively undermines his credibility.

Then there's the laughably purple prose: there are enough "pelvic girdles," "mons pubae," "deep clefts", "loamy loins", and "egestive" functions to entertain for hours.

But worst is how lazily the whole thing is written.

Wolfe can't be bothered to actually write dialect so he substitutes it with the occasional post-hoc translation at random times that is supposed to clue the reader in to the fact the speaker is talking with an accent. For example: "'Everybody told me'--everbuddy tole me--'you was smart, but I never knowed you could get up and give a speech like that!' Like'at."

Then he pounds pounds pounds pounds the reader with the lazy technique of simply repeating a word several times in an attempt to get across . . . something . . . I guess intensity or something else he's too lazy to actually describe. Speaking of describing, Wolfe violates a cardinal principle of fiction--show, don't tell--throughout. Starting about two-thirds of the way through the book we're supposed to know his main character is depressed because . . . he tells us, over and over, that she's "a depressed girl." Later, having to wrap things up he resorts to telling us she's "a very lucky girl."

All this, plus numerous misspellings, sentence fragments, and tortured sentence structure made this a chore to read. The only thing that kept me going was wondering just how bad it was going to get and what Wolfe's next howing mistake would be. When it was done, my only reaction was, "Thank God!"

This book reads more like a sociological inventory than a novel. It's heavy-handed and cliche-ridden, both in style and conception. Wolfe should have stuck to the short satirical pieces he wrote long ago.

In his first two novels, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full”, Tom Wolfe satirised American big business and the country’s legal system; with his third, “I am Charlotte Simmons”, he turns his attention to education. The title character is an intellectually brilliant working-class girl from an impoverished rural backwater of North Carolina who wins a scholarship to Dupont University. (The university is a fictitious one, although it is supposedly set in a real town, Chester, Pennsylvania). The plot deals with the relationships between Charlotte and three male admirers- Hoyt Thorpe (a member of the exclusive Saint Ray fraternity), Joseph “Jojo” Johanssen (a star athlete on the college's basketball team) and Adam Gellin (a politically radical journalist on the college newspaper).

There are two institutions at American universities which seem incomprehensible to outsiders, the fraternity system and the sports programmes which allow star athletes to benefit from a college education, however modest their academic achievements may be. It is these two institutions which lie at the centre of the novel. Dupont has a particularly successful basketball team whose members are held in the highest regard by most of their fellow students. The team’s coach, Buster Roth, is a national celebrity whose earnings, boosted by endorsements, come to two million dollars a year, far more than the salary of any of the academic staff, including the College President.

Dupont is supposed to be an elite, Ivy League establishment, on a par with Harvard, Yale or Princeton, the sort of place where a high proportion of the faculty are Nobel Prize winners. It therefore surprised me that much of the student body, as described by Wolfe, is pervaded by a culture of anti-intellectualism. The most important thing, for most students, is to be seen as “cool”, and there is a widespread belief that coolness and academic effort are mutually incompatible. This attitude is particularly common among the athletes and the frat boys, who regard diligent study more as a vice than as a virtue, and those like Jojo’s friend Charles or Hoyt’s friend Vance who actually do work hard and achieve good grades are careful to hide this fact from their colleagues. Even outside the basketball team and the fraternity building, however, many students have a similar attitude and value social success more than the intellectual variety. Charlotte’s snobbish, upper-class room-mate Beverly, for example, is far more interested in getting drunk and sleeping around than she is in the subjects she is supposed to be studying.

Like most of his fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe is a male version of Beverly- good looking, sexually promiscuous, hard-drinking and with a powerful sense of entitlement. Although his grades are poor and his family are not as grand as he likes to make out, he believes that, merely by virtue of his membership of Saint Ray, he is entitled to some position of power at the heart of American society, preferably in the financial sector where the big bucks are to be made.

Adam Gellin is very different to Hoyt, and in some ways much nicer. (He is, for example, a sincere and generous friend to Charlotte, whom Hoyt treats badly). He is genuinely intelligent and works hard at his studies. He too, however, has his own sense of entitlement. He is part of a left-wing intellectual clique who call themselves the “Millennial Mutants” and who believe that by virtue of their supposed intellectual gifts they are the future movers and shakers of the world, entitled to some position of power at the heart of American society, preferably in Government or in some opinion-forming body. There are also some curious gaps in Adam’s knowledge; a self-proclaimed radical intellectual, for example, really should have known that Karl Marx was German, not Austrian, and that his “Das Kapital” was written in the 1860s, not the 1880s.

Jojo undergoes considerable character development in the course of the novel. In the early chapters he is the stereotypical “dumb jock”, living only for basketball. (His great ambition is to become a professional player in the NBA). He largely ignores his academic work, doing only the bare minimum demanded of him, and sometimes not even that. (An important plot development occurs when Jojo persuades Adam to write an essay for him). Yet, partly as a result of Charlotte’s influence, his personality undergoes a change. He starts to take a genuine interest in academic subjects and even signs up for an intellectually rigorous course in Greek philosophy, despite thereby incurring the scorn of Coach Roth who insists that his athletes should only take least demanding courses possible. (There are similarities between Jojo and Conrad in “A Man in Full” who also undergoes personal development as a result of exposure to Greek thought). Although, in terms of points on the IQ scale, Jojo is probably less “intelligent” than someone like Hoyt Thorpe, he has more potential to benefit from his time at Dupont. At least he has learned that knowledge and learning can be valuable in their own right, not simply as a means to some materialistic goal.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as either “The Bonfire of the Vanities” or “A Man in Full”, and I think that the main reason for this was that Charlotte, the novel’s main character, is also a rather contradictory one. On the one hand, we are told that she is not only formidably intelligent but also beautiful and self-confident. On the other hand she finds it difficult to make friends, yearns to be accepted by Beverly and her set (even though she can see just how shallow they are), worries about whether she can get Hoyt as a boyfriend (even though it should be obvious to her that he is a worthless bastard) and is thrown into a deep depression when he cruelly dumps her after their one sexual encounter.

Part of Charlotte’s problem is that she finds it difficult to reconcile the values of her home town with those of the university. At first she tries to live according to the Puritanical moral code she has learned from her devoutly Christian family, especially her mother, but slides towards an acceptance of the far more hedonistic Dupont ethos, possibly because in Charlotte’s case the intellectual principle behind this code is not so much “What would Jesus do?” as “What would Momma say?” Wolfe never really makes it clear whether Charlotte actually shares Momma’s religious beliefs. Towards the end of the novel he implies that she does not, but makes curiously little of this fact, even though from Momma’s point of view Charlotte’s abandoning her Christian faith would be a far worse sin than her trying alcohol, or even losing her virginity.

Apart from the sex scenes, which as other reviewers have pointed out are horribly clinical, another reason why I was less impressed by this novel than by its predecessors is that Wolfe’s picture of the American academic world never really came to life in the same way as his portrayal of, say, high finance in “The Bonfire of the Vanities”. Some “campus novels” (“Lucky Jim”, “Places Where They Sing”, “Porterhouse Blue”) have concentrated on the university teaching staff, but this one concentrates far more on the students themselves, and Wolfe, already in his seventies when he wrote the book, gives the impression that he does not have much interest in, or sympathy for, the younger generation. He seems to take it as granted that the unattractive qualities which he objects to in a few students- drunkenness, promiscuity, snobbery, anti-intellectualism- are widespread throughout the student body as a whole; the “Millennial Mutants” are presented as exceptions to a general rule, a small spark of intellectual light in the vast Philistine darkness that is Dupont University. If that is really Tom Wolfe’s view of his country’s young people one wonders why he bothered to write an entire novel about them.

This book is definitely well researched: dialects, slang, minute details of life on campus of an American university, formidable knowledge of life of student-athletes, even some excursions into neuroscience and philosophy …

Unfortunately, it is not sufficient for a book to be well researched to become great or even just good literature. Wolfe's books will always suffer from comparison with his brilliant Bonfire of the Vanities. Its power is not in the fact that it's well researched (which it is), but - first and foremost - in being believable, natural, persuasive, spontaneous. This cannot be said about I am Charlotte Simmons.

"I am Charlotte Simmons" is an interesting book, you can even call it even a “page turner”, and it is believable - to a degree. But a number of characters leave much to be desired. All Charlotte’s hometown people, far in the woods and mountains of North Carolina, have certain cardboard aspect to them. They are all tokens, rather than real people. And the amount of space Wolfe dedicates to describing them makes these parts of the book especially tiresome. Also many parts of this book leave you with a feeling that what you’re reading is so called "young adult" fiction.

Even main, key characters - that of a frat boy Hoyt Thorpe, and student-athlete basketball player Jojo are not sufficiently persuasive and consistent. It is difficult to believe in Jojo’s sincere desire to take advanced philosophy course, in his attempt to talk about it with the coach Buster Roth. Hoyt Thorpe is more believable, but his personality is not given enough life, some of his actions aren’t sufficiently explained.

Sometimes Wolfe loses taste and the sense of proportion. Why would he need to say "vast arboreally umbrellaed asphalt plain" when describing a parking lot at the university campus? Also the family of Dupont alumni which comes to the basketball game and winds up seeing all the outrages at the student tailgate party - this family comes into the reader’s focus and quickly goes away with no sufficient reason for being around at all.

Still, some characters are very interesting, like another central figure, Adam Gellin, a Jewish boy who writes a course paper for basketball player Jojo, and then confesses to the professor Quat, who is leveling plagiarism charge against Jojo. Adam brings to mind Klim Samgin from Maxim Gorky’s “The Life of Klim Samgin”, who was all “for progressive causes”, and who’s moral degradation was so similar to Adam’s.

Towards the end, it feels like Wolfe himself becomes bored with his book: last few chapters leave you with a feeling that he wants just to wrap up all the loose ends as quickly as he can. Oh, yes, and one more thing: the most boring sex scene I’ve ever read in my life is in this book: the scene of deflowering of Charlotte Simmons. The book is interesting, but more as a work of journalism, rather than literature.

Tom Wolfe has written a brilliant satire of American university undergraduate education during the first decade of the 21st century, as seen mainly through the eyes of a talented, self-assured, but naive girl from a small mountain town in North Carolina. If anything, things have gotten worse during the past dozen years since this insightful, funny, dizzying, and disturbing tome was written. The uncontrolled abuse of alcohol and drugs, the rampant sex, and the unconscionable consumable excesses of the moneyed class, much of it by those who are still teenagers, is on full display, along with overpaid athletic coaches, who enrich themselves while abusing and controlling their student athletes, the ignored faculty, the nostalgic alumni on their second spouses, the truth-seeking (and fame seeking) student journalists, the higher-than-thou protesters, and the compromised president who tries to keep it all running along fairly smoothly.

This book is appropriately profane, irreverent, and vulgar at times, because so is its subject. Wolfe unveils the failings, the excesses, and the hypocrisy of America's finest institutions of higher learning. Readers will certainly wonder why they continue to throw their hard-earned money and entrust their precious offspring to these centers of debauchery, inequality, and waste.

Read this book when it first came out - not once, but twice, then passed it along to my brother, who also couldn't put it down.
Tom Wolfe at his best, putting his thumbprint perfectly down, nailing the culture on the College campuses across America and the humorous but true stereotypes of the people who inhabit them - from the students, to the professors, to the sports coaches!
You can practically see the future of the snowflake takeover coming, as Wolfe is so apt to presciently predict the future, one of the things which makes so much of his writing, timeless.

I still remember feeling queasy as I read the first part of “The Sun Also Rises” as a high school student; as the characters drank to excess in the Paris cafes, I, too, felt like I had had one too many a drink. Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons” doesn’t rise to the literary merits of Hemingway’s classic novel, but it also caused me to feel empathetically ill as its main character slides into her slow, sickening tailspin. The experience is so unrelentingly appalling that you trudge on only because you hope relief is around the corner.

Oh, did I mention that this is a comic novel?

“I Am Charlotte Simmons” is about a naïve but accomplished high student graduate from the boondocks of the western North Carolina hills who is granted a full ride to attend a fictional, Ivy League-like university in Pennsylvania called Dupont. At the outset, Charlotte is brimming with self-confidence and self-awareness, but is otherwise unprepared for the arrogance and lax sexual mores of her affluent classmates. Although Charlotte is not a wholly sympathetic character--she’s too holier-than-thou in how she treats others to be entirely likable--you still want to see her succeed in maintaining her dignity amidst what poses for contemporary campus life.

For comic effect, Wolfe’s characters seem hyper-realistic, even a little cartoonish. I was most struck by the character of Jojo Johanssen, the school’s rare white basketball star. He is alternatingly doltish and inquisitive, awkward and comfortable in his skin. He is one of the few characters that grows somewhat during the course of the story, becoming more enthralled with philosophy than with sex. You think that perhaps Jojo could grow up to be a Bill Bradley, but you are continually frustrated by his apparent inability to do the right thing. Nonetheless, of all of the main characters, Jojo is the most endearing.

Wolfe draws a lot of attention to his writing. There are lengthy diversions on the various contemporary usages and meanings of common sexual and scatological slang words. Wolfe also likes to drop clever similes, such as saying, when Charlotte, dissembling, told her former teacher that she would like to get together with her at Christmas-time, “the words came clanking out like empty bottles in a bag.” And again, when Charlotte put into the hand of her nerdish quasi-boyfriend Adam a copy of an email that he wasn’t sure he wanted to see, he “looked at the piece of paper as if it were a small, harmless animal that had unaccountably hopped aboard.” Wolfe likes to use language ironically as well, such as in describing the plebian Jojo talking “soto voce into the phone.” Indeed, much of the voice of the narration, which switches depending on whose perspective it assumes, is ironic: when we hear, for instance, Charlotte rationalizing to herself the compromises that she makes in her personal behavior, we know better.

Wolfe’s tendentious novel serves to critique the lack of a life of the mind in today’s academe. Dupont stands in for all colleges that overemphasize their athletic programs, essentially hiring athletically gifted, but academically unprepared students to fill its major sports rosters, and to what end? To bring in more money from alumni? Not so, says Wolfe. The author also suggests that the college student is woefully underemployed: there’s just not enough work assigned to keep students from frittering away their time at parties. The whole enterprise seems dubious: it’s mostly an expensive waste of time.

“I Am Charlotte Simmons” is both readable and, frankly, forgettable. Wolfe’s argument against modern academe might better have been told in non-fiction. As a story the novel suffers in being overly long and overwrought. In forty years, if I’m alive, I might still remember feeling inebriated when I read “The Sun Also Rises,” but I may not remember Wolfe’s novel at all. Unless it’s because it gave me second thoughts about sending my high school daughter to college.

The audiobook was read by the apparently inexhaustible Dylan Baker, best known for his television acting roles, who does a remarkable job with the varied accents and patterns of speech of the many male and female white and African-American characters. If occasionally his women sound a bit like drag queens, and his male African-American characters like old men, well, he probably should be given a break. With novels of this length, though, publishers would be well advised to use two narrators, male and female.

"I Am Charlotte Simmons," is the story of an eighteen-year-old self-described "mountain prodigy," and virgin who leaves her humble abode in Sparta, NC to begin her first semester at Dupont University and soak up all that esoteric knowledge. Unfortunately, for the eponymous Charlotte, the school is populated solely by stereotypes, familiar to anyone who has seen a movie like "Animal House" or "Revenge of the Nerds." In fact, the book's plot is similar to the movie "Loser," in which Jason Biggs plays a bright hick who arrives at college to find that the entire campus consists of spoiled, rich kids, who are so exaggerated in their evilness that they fail to resemble anyone you'd actually meet in real life. There are also plots about cheating and date rape.

Like Andie in "Pretty in Pink" (trust me, my pop culture references are about as hip as Mr. Wolfe's), Charlotte is poor and modestly garbed but far more attractive than she realizes, and thus almost immediately snares the attention of three would-be swains: Hoyt Thorpe, an entitled frat boy who gets entangled in a scandal involving the governor of California; Adam, a misfit intellectual who tutors dumb jocks as a work study job; and JoJo, one of the few white basketball players, who is starting to chafe at being stereotyped as well, a dumb jock. All the girls on campus are either bulimic boarding school blondes like Charlotte's roommate Beverly, strident hairy legged feminists, or hangers-on, whose sole ambition is to be popular. Nowhere on campus (and it is described as a large student body) is there a political or religious group where the heroine might find like-minded souls, nor does she appear to have an academic advisor who could give her a few tips about which courses to take. Nor does she have a work study job which you'd think would be a given for a student on scholarship. But I digress.

Charlotte when she arrives, is a bit shocked by the coed bathrooms, coarse talk, and lewd behavior of the male species, despite having lived her whole life in a tiny shack with one adult male and two younger males. Although she looks down upon her classmates for their drinking and hooking up, she will eventually succumb and indulge in these vices herself. The book ends with a bad guy punished and a good guy rewarded - and as for Charlotte herself, she's a little more aware of what makes a person "popular," and that - here the book sharply swerves from the typical Hollywood movie plot, it's better to be in than out.

This is a long book - about 700 pages. It has some funny bits - unfortunately, I think a lot of them weren't met to be amusing to the reader. If you've seen a movie about college or just have some basic common sense, what the author has to say about today's whippersnappers when they are away from home for the first time, won't be surprising or shocking. The pace is glacial. There is a ton of backstory. If the main character had begun the book less naïve, her predicament might have been more believable, and if she had managed to evolve from the judgmental girl she was at the start, she would have had my sympathy. However, this wasn't to be.

I Am Charlotte Simmons is filled with filthy language and unspeakable situations. Unfortunately, I think it is a very accurate description of contemporary college life.

Tom Wolfe knew what he was doing when he set out to shock readers with this depiction of a naive Southern girl's scholarship-funded experience at a prestigious university. In no way could Charlotte have been prepared for what she encountered. And from the experiences of my children and their friends, I have to believe that the alcohol-fueled bacchanal Wolfe depicts is very close to the mark.

Consider this. Many schools have done away with Friday classes altogether, which students use as an excuse to start the party on Thursday night. Often, early-morning classes are gone, too. Schools turn a blind eye to students' drinking in their dorm rooms. Rules against overnight "guests" are rarely enforced--roommates are "sexiled" or forced to pretend not to notice, or care about, the activities going on in the other bed. While some kids get to college on their own merits, let's face it: a legacy student with the money to pay the tuition is going to get in, and he's not there to study.

Charlotte is surprised to find the world that exists on campus; she had thought that it would be peopled with others like herself, who were actually interested in learning. Instead, the financial gulf between her and the frat boys and sorority girls is the most painfully obvious problem she finds at first. There really is no niche for Charlotte, who wants to fit in while still retaining her values. Charlotte is treated brutally and exploited, both physically and emotionally. The decency with which she grew up is hard to find at her university. Modesty, chastity, self-control and respect for others is pretty thin on the ground.

The year my older daughter started college, another freshman girl was murdered at the same school. She was staying with a bunch of young men in a house off-campus before classes started. She had her own car, which was found miles from the school. One of the men living in the house had killed her; as I recall, sex and alcohol were involved.

Say what you want to, but the relaxed moral code that says it's fine for girls to stay in men's homes (and share hotel rooms, which Charlotte does) and to feel free to indulge in alcohol (Charlotte does this too) and casual sex (into which Charlotte is pushed, somewhat knowingly) had dire consequences in this case. While the overly-sheltered Charlotte is drawn as ultra-naive, poor, and idealistic, the truth is that few 18-year-old kids are prepared to hold their own in the prevailing wild lifestyles on campuses.

This book is wrenching, heartbreaking, and incredibly frank. Yes, it's a novel, and yes, what happens to Charlotte is terrible, but I would encourage every parent of a teen who hopes to attend college to read it. Education has become secondary to partying and hookups. Tom Wolfe is trying to get us to open our eyes. If this book gets you to dig a little deeper into what really goes on at your child's campus, it's done its work.

Tom Wolfe's writing, his incredible ear for dialogue both spoken and interior, is amazing. He intricately weaves sports, booze, lust, bits of erudite brain research and the grit of clashing egos into this story. (As a book I happened to be reading when the Penn State scandal broke, it accurately paints the stranglehold athletic programs can have on colleges.) Wolfe's detailed research into the vernacular, evidenced by his long list of acknowledgements, renders an absorbing novel.

But I wonder... has he ever known someone who is NOT a complete narcissist? The arc of his characters is limited to the evolution of their ability to manifest their ego within their common milieu, in this case college life. Wolfe tries to get into the heads of women through his heroine Charlotte, and he has moments of brilliant success. However, outside of a few aha! instances arising from her absorption in her studies, she spends every waking moment concerned with how she is perceived. She is utterly self-centered, as are Adam and Hoyt and the others who populate Dupont, which we take to be an Ivy League university. Charlotte is a sympathetic character, plagued as she is by the contempt of her more worldly roommate and all the women she encounters. We want her to evolve and win the hearts around her because she possesses a type of innocence and thirst for understanding. But the hoped-for deepening of her character never comes. She remains shallow through the end; she merely becomes more adept at managing her brand among her peers. Competition trumps compassion within Charlotte and her peers. And while it's true there is enormous ego in us all, and constant hunger for recognition -- this is not all there is to life and relationships as Wolfe would have us believe. The one sympathetic and dimensional character he gives us, Jojo, is relegated to the periphery of the story. The subject of rape with roofies is glibly hinted at, but this rampant problem deserves a more honest look than Wolfe gave it.

Even at this most difficult age, the threshold of adulthood, a real-life Charlotte would find young women like herself with which to bond. And as much sex and partying as there is in college life today, relationships go deeper than this and some people actually study, learn, form lifelong attachments and become more deeply engaged in the world around them. In the end, "I am Charlotte Simmons" falls short of its promise, even as a social satire. But for a sheerly entertaining read, rich in a rare degree of mastery of the craft of writing, it is worth picking up.

I am Charlotte Simmons may mis-represent, gratuitously simplify, and be just dead wrong in much of its portrayal of university life, of students, teachers and the social context just beyond the ivory towers. All that said, Mr. Wolfe has written a relevant and important novel, not just because he is not altogether wrong about the world he portrays (which, admittedly, is to do no more than is proverbially done with faint praise), but because he has written a book about a timeless dilemma -- the search for, and assertion of identity, and the impact on that search of the larger, social landscape in which identity seeks to assert itself.

When Charlotte Simmons proclaims, "I am Charlotte Simmons," never far behind is the question, "And just who is she?" The answer grows more difficult with time. If she begins the novel confident of her intellectual and moral distinctiveness, she comes to find, for instance, that in her romantic relationships she is no more immune than others from the desire to possess, on the one hand, and to surrender, on the other. And then, there's neuroscience, a field to which she is attracted, a field which has replaced Marx, Freud and others as a leading paradigm in the study of human behavior. What does it mean for Charlotte to choose wisely -- to choose well -- in a world that grants nobel prizes to scientists at her university for demonstrating that such questions are not so much unimportant as simply irrelevant? If physics side stepped teleology, neuroscience appears to Charlotte on the verge of doing the same with free will. If so, just who is Charlotte Simmons then?

The great strength of Wolfe's book is his recognition that none of this is new. Socrates is never below, but rather very much on the surface in this book; Charlotte herself hales from Sparta; and the wounded ego of Achilles is ubiquitous in the student body.

Years ago I recall reading an essay by Tom Wolfe in which he lamented what he perceived as the narrow, irrelevance of contemporary fiction. Whatever else novels were achieving, they were not, according to Mr. Wolfe, addressing the challenging questions, the major issues, facing modern readers. Fiction, he claimed, had grown self-contained and arid, populated by characters who seemed disconnected from any social world. In Charlotte, Wolfe has given us a character that resonates with our own time and displays a classic continuity with her past.

I Am Charlotte Simmons is filled with filthy language and unspeakable situations. Unfortunately, I think it is a very accurate description of contemporary college life.

Tom Wolfe knew what he was doing when he set out to shock readers with this depiction of a naive Southern girl's scholarship-funded experience at a prestigious university. In no way could Charlotte have been prepared for what she encountered. And from the experiences of my children and their friends, I have to believe that the alcohol-fueled bacchanal Wolfe depicts is very close to the mark.

Consider this. Many schools have done away with Friday classes altogether, which students use as an excuse to start the party on Thursday night. Often, early-morning classes are gone, too. Schools turn a blind eye to students' drinking in their dorm rooms. Rules against overnight "guests" are rarely enforced--roommates are "sexiled" or forced to pretend not to notice, or care about, the activities going on in the other bed. While some kids get to college on their own merits, let's face it: a legacy student with the money to pay the tuition is going to get in, and he's not there to study.

Charlotte is surprised to find the world that exists on campus; she had thought that it would be peopled with others like herself, who were actually interested in learning. Instead, the financial gulf between her and the frat boys and sorority girls is the most painfully obvious problem she finds at first. There really is no niche for Charlotte, who wants to fit in while still retaining her values. Charlotte is treated brutally and exploited, both physically and emotionally. The decency with which she grew up is hard to find at her university. Modesty, chastity, self-control and respect for others is pretty thin on the ground.

The year my older daughter started college, another freshman girl was murdered at the same school. She was staying with a bunch of young men in a house off-campus before classes started. She had her own car, which was found miles from the school. One of the men living in the house had killed her; as I recall, sex and alcohol were involved.

Say what you want to, but the relaxed moral code that says it's fine for girls to stay in men's homes (and share hotel rooms, which Charlotte does) and to feel free to indulge in alcohol (Charlotte does this too) and casual sex (into which Charlotte is pushed, somewhat knowingly) had dire consequences in this case. While the overly-sheltered Charlotte is drawn as ultra-naive, poor, and idealistic, the truth is that few 18-year-old kids are prepared to hold their own in the prevailing wild lifestyles on campuses.

This book is wrenching, heartbreaking, and incredibly frank. Yes, it's a novel, and yes, what happens to Charlotte is terrible, but I would encourage every parent of a teen who hopes to attend college to read it. Education has become secondary to partying and hookups. Tom Wolfe is trying to get us to open our eyes. If this book gets you to dig a little deeper into what really goes on at your child's campus, it's done its work.

Tom Wolfe's writing, his incredible ear for dialogue both spoken and interior, is amazing. He intricately weaves sports, booze, lust, bits of erudite brain research and the grit of clashing egos into this story. (As a book I happened to be reading when the Penn State scandal broke, it accurately paints the stranglehold athletic programs can have on colleges.) Wolfe's detailed research into the vernacular, evidenced by his long list of acknowledgements, renders an absorbing novel.

But I wonder... has he ever known someone who is NOT a complete narcissist? The arc of his characters is limited to the evolution of their ability to manifest their ego within their common milieu, in this case college life. Wolfe tries to get into the heads of women through his heroine Charlotte, and he has moments of brilliant success. However, outside of a few aha! instances arising from her absorption in her studies, she spends every waking moment concerned with how she is perceived. She is utterly self-centered, as are Adam and Hoyt and the others who populate Dupont, which we take to be an Ivy League university. Charlotte is a sympathetic character, plagued as she is by the contempt of her more worldly roommate and all the women she encounters. We want her to evolve and win the hearts around her because she possesses a type of innocence and thirst for understanding. But the hoped-for deepening of her character never comes. She remains shallow through the end; she merely becomes more adept at managing her brand among her peers. Competition trumps compassion within Charlotte and her peers. And while it's true there is enormous ego in us all, and constant hunger for recognition -- this is not all there is to life and relationships as Wolfe would have us believe. The one sympathetic and dimensional character he gives us, Jojo, is relegated to the periphery of the story. The subject of rape with roofies is glibly hinted at, but this rampant problem deserves a more honest look than Wolfe gave it.

Even at this most difficult age, the threshold of adulthood, a real-life Charlotte would find young women like herself with which to bond. And as much sex and partying as there is in college life today, relationships go deeper than this and some people actually study, learn, form lifelong attachments and become more deeply engaged in the world around them. In the end, "I am Charlotte Simmons" falls short of its promise, even as a social satire. But for a sheerly entertaining read, rich in a rare degree of mastery of the craft of writing, it is worth picking up.

Most authors have their idiosyncratic crutch terms--words they use with disproportionate frequency--for whatever reason. It's unfortunate because it takes the reader away from the story and makes the fact that the author is writing a fiction too obvious. Almost all authors do it--I was aware of this when after an edit of one of my books, I kept seeing the bizarre phrase "almost yell" throughout the text. In "I Am Charlotte Simmons," Tom Wolfe's favorite terms are "solar plexus," "insouciance," and most egregious, "this way and that." It's clear Wolfe's vocabulary is superb, but it seems he couldn't find any other term suitable for "multiple directions."

The crutch terms are certainly noticeable, but they don't take away from the stunning and shocking work that Wolfe's third novel--a portrait of the American higher education system and youth culture--is. They don't take away from the authentic appraisal of the typical frat brothers, jocks, brainiacs, and social rejects that populate our universities these days. And they definitely don't take away from the deeply moving story of a tortured soul fighting between equal desires of cerebral stimulation and social acceptance in a burlesque of love and learning.

Of course, the story doesn't reflect all students at the modern university but Wolfe absolutely nails the urges and desires that each and every one has. It would have been nice to see a character with intelligent and honest ideals--all we're left with is half-decent or unscrupulous deviants projecting a shoddy underlying political message. Still, the quality of New Journalism truth conveyed in the fiction and the wealth of vivid humanity portrayed makes this work well worth the read, this way or that.

I am Charlotte Simmons may mis-represent, gratuitously simplify, and be just dead wrong in much of its portrayal of university life, of students, teachers and the social context just beyond the ivory towers. All that said, Mr. Wolfe has written a relevant and important novel, not just because he is not altogether wrong about the world he portrays (which, admittedly, is to do no more than is proverbially done with faint praise), but because he has written a book about a timeless dilemma -- the search for, and assertion of identity, and the impact on that search of the larger, social landscape in which identity seeks to assert itself.

When Charlotte Simmons proclaims, "I am Charlotte Simmons," never far behind is the question, "And just who is she?" The answer grows more difficult with time. If she begins the novel confident of her intellectual and moral distinctiveness, she comes to find, for instance, that in her romantic relationships she is no more immune than others from the desire to possess, on the one hand, and to surrender, on the other. And then, there's neuroscience, a field to which she is attracted, a field which has replaced Marx, Freud and others as a leading paradigm in the study of human behavior. What does it mean for Charlotte to choose wisely -- to choose well -- in a world that grants nobel prizes to scientists at her university for demonstrating that such questions are not so much unimportant as simply irrelevant? If physics side stepped teleology, neuroscience appears to Charlotte on the verge of doing the same with free will. If so, just who is Charlotte Simmons then?

The great strength of Wolfe's book is his recognition that none of this is new. Socrates is never below, but rather very much on the surface in this book; Charlotte herself hales from Sparta; and the wounded ego of Achilles is ubiquitous in the student body.

Years ago I recall reading an essay by Tom Wolfe in which he lamented what he perceived as the narrow, irrelevance of contemporary fiction. Whatever else novels were achieving, they were not, according to Mr. Wolfe, addressing the challenging questions, the major issues, facing modern readers. Fiction, he claimed, had grown self-contained and arid, populated by characters who seemed disconnected from any social world. In Charlotte, Wolfe has given us a character that resonates with our own time and displays a classic continuity with her past.

Tom Wolfe writes novels with cartoon character people - how does he make them come alive anyway? You have to love-hate his books because they are so preposterous - but this one has a happy ending so you can breath a big sigh of relief and read through this meandering plot to the well tied up end. Skim over some of his over the top caricatures and prolonged agonizing descriptions of events (like the scene at the hotel.....after awhile you just have to avert your eyes. Likewise, boring descriptions of basketball games and basketball players). Still, in the end, loved the book. You can't believe what Tom Wolfe writes - until you recall that Bonfire of the Vanities came out almost simultaneously with the Tawana Brawley incident - in my mind, the events in that novel and real life news are pretty much one and the same. So somewhere out there, these events probably are happening on college campuses, even ten years later. Gasp. Awful thought! Send your kids to state!

This is the standard Tom Wolfe novel where characters face turbulence and inevitably suffer downfall. There is much social satire and the subject area concerns students at an American University (a fictitious one).

The character type under scrutiny and under the gun is the young American male who is portrayed as sexually callous, anti-intellectual and consumed by an insatiable appetite for sports - whether it is a video games or in an arena. The main character is Charlotte, an innocent virginal girl who has a brilliant mind, but somehow seems unconvincingly asexual for an 18 year old adolescent. But her portrayal as a rape victim from the handsome but utterly parasitical Hoyt is convincing and is the pathos of this story. She is infatuated by his charming deviousness and while a part of her feels sincerity from him another suspects ulterior and lascivious motives. Even after she is raped she still has ambivalent feelings towards him. At the end of the story she has succumbed to `popularity' and is going out with a dim-witted basketball player. This was less convincing (or maybe its' just me wishing for a rescue plan!)

The alienation and loneliness Charlotte feels in this large institution feels very real.

However compared to two previous works of Tom Wolfe (`Bonfire of the Vanities' and `A Man in Full') this story has less to relate. Its' world was primarily concerned with underdeveloped adolescents. `Bonfire' was far more satirical with a diversity of characters and explored class relationships in America. The same could be said for `A Man in Full' which also had a wider geographical range.

Also `Charlotte' was far too long and repetitious. Too many frat parties were described. There was no need to have so many upper class girl snobs. Drunkenness, debauchery and snootiness were constantly recurring - like advertisements on T.V.

But Tom Wolfe never fails to entertain and enlighten. I will be following his next work.

Since the numerous reviews already mention much of what makes this novel fantastic, I will focus on several items I appreciated that I haven't seen mentioned.
The first is the setting--Wolfe's creation of Dupont University as a conglomerate of top-performing universities in both academics and athletics established a canvass to create characters and scenarios that led to the examination of a number of phenomena that occur at modern-day American universities. It also made the combination of high-achieving students (at least in their areas of interest) that attend such schools more plausible in one environment.
One character that I haven't seen mentioned in any review is Adam Gellin, the hero of all nerds trying to claw their way to the top in a world where brains won't accomplish everything. While each of the four focus characters is involved in exceptional circumstances, the characterization is developed to the point that the reader can identify with the choices the characters make. None of the characters are entirely likeable, but all of them are believable.
Finally, Wolfe's power of description is hard to match, and this story is loaded with explanations of mundane situations worded in a way that will make you laugh out loud. I was a bit hesitant to read this book based on the reviews, but if you have been to college, it will be hard not to relate to a great deal of what happens in this book.

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.

First off, I must say that I was completely engrossed by Wolfe's masterful social realism. Reading Wolfe's dialogue is like witnessing a conversation first-hand. Fabulous writing! I don't generally pick up 700-page novels, but his elegant prose, his deftness in writing dialogue, and his command of punctuation make the pages fly by (at least the first few hundred) and transported me into the story like few other writers can.

The story has large flaws. I identified greatly w/Charlotte's character. I, too, was a Presidential Scholar, naive and unblemished, heading off to college. From personal experience, I see two implausible inconsistencies in Charlotte's character. First, any girl of her intelligence would know what vulgar terms mean, even if she didn't use them. Even the most naive, strait-laced girl, too embarrassed to ask a friend for the definition of vulgar terms would, with Charlotte's resourcefulness, look them up in a dictionary or, nowadays, on the Internet! Second, a girl w/Charlotte's strict religious upbringing probably would have sought asylum in one of the numerous religious groups on college campuses. Wolfe doesn't even mention their existence, but in reality they abound. Just because she's brilliant doesn't mean she's agnostic, and it's hard for me to believe that Charlotte would not have sought "belonging" amongst such a group, even if she didn't completely fit in with such a crowd, being more cerebral than 90% of her Dupont counterparts. Of course, a book with the plot of "naive virgin maintains sobriety and virginity through freshman year of college" isn't much of a page-turner.

Furthermore, it was hard for me to believe the drunken deflowering episode w/the frat boy. It was so completely incongruous with her perspicacious discernment of others' moral character (or lack thereof). Charlotte knew what an utter loser such a boy really was by all objective standards, despite being the "alpha-est" of alpha males at his fraternity. In this regard, Wolfe himself seems to engage in a perverse schadenfreude while detailing his protagonist's fall from grace. In reality, I think Charlotte would be the type to get a serious, mature, sober boyfriend at a young age. She would probably have two or three long-term, monogamous dating relationships before marrying. Honestly, she would be far too picky to waste her time on relationships she thought were going nowhere. She wouldn't squander her affections on just anyone. After all, she has goals and ambitions. She is Charlotte Simmons!

I realized just a few chapters into I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS why it should be another bestseller for legendary Tom Wolfe. Most of this doorstop of a book (676 pages) takes place on the campus of fictional Dupont College, a mid-size, baby ivy, basketball powerhouse located just west of Philly (can you say Villanova?). Its broad cast of characters includes all the usual college stereotypes --- dumb jocks, church mouse poor pizza delivering geniuses, boarding school born and to the manor bred Paris Hilton-types, holier-than-thou professors, winning coaches, etc. His female protagonist, Charlotte Simmons, hails from a tiny mountain town in Western North Carolina, and while some of her backwoods ways are a bit clichéd, her lack of current fashion or culture sense is utterly believable. Wolfe has a variety of plots, subplots, and even counter subplots going on amidst a background of heavy-duty college excess. The irrefutable fact that will propel it to the bestseller list is that everyone is going to find a character at Dupont College to whom they can totally relate and commiserate with.

Charlotte Simmons is a very naïve, extremely smart mountain girl whose intellect and consequent "prizes" (a perfect SAT score, Presidential Scholar award, and full scholarship to elite Dupont College) have elevated her to an academic plane her backwoods family and friends cannot even see. They hold her in awe (with the exception of a few good ole boy classmates) and send her on her college journey with plenty of emotional baggage that she still is innocent enough to believe she can carry. Besides her parents, little brothers, cousins, and neighbors who are trusting that she will do great things with her time at Dupont, there is Miss Pennington, the teacher/mentor who has aided and abetted her quest for "a life of the mind." Charlotte cannot let her down, no matter what.

Charlotte arrives at Dupont with great hopes and aspirations. It is on this beautiful campus that Wolfe introduces the rest of the cast, all of whom will somehow color Charlotte's experience --- and will quickly find themselves mired in dirty messes of their own making. Ideals are sacrificed, rules broken and, make no mistake, lots and lots of beers chugged and panties raided. Wolfe's research for this book has been widely touted, and I must say it is evident. He came away with a very clear picture of what college life today is really like, despite what most parents would like to believe. Charlotte's tentative foray into the college social scene, and subsequent triumphs and failures, could have been scripted from my own college days almost twenty years ago. It wasn't all good or all bad, and it was difficult taking control of the chaos, no matter how hard you tried.

Most of the primary actors, even the good guys, in this drama are begging to be reviled. With a few exceptions, however, most of the major and minor characters end up redeeming themselves and therefore kept me from utterly despising them. Many of Charlotte's mannerisms (including her speech) and her priggish attitude towards the many fellow students she considers below her should be enough for the reader to start hoping she gets her comeuppance. But when she does get her "due," her initiation to a life that is NOT of the mind, it is difficult to feel anything but genuine pain and empathy for an academically learned yet worldly dumb eighteen-year-old. It never ceases to amaze me that the very college walls we turn to for higher learning should consistently render out, alongside with its diplomatic "tickets to adulthood," such utter and complete betrayal of one's youth.

You don't need to have had any college experiences to enjoy Charlotte Simmons; the same dramas unfold on many larger high school campuses, I'm sure. This novel offers a realistic, unabashed, and therefore extremely unglamorous look at modern college life. Certain parts will make you cringe with embarrassed recognition and others will seem downright distasteful. But I'll bet you one thing --- like me, you won't be able to put it down and will be turning page after page right up to its conclusion, where Charlotte Simmons ends up in a role we never could have imagined her playing. Bravo, Mr. Wolfe.

--- Reviewed by Jamie Layton

"I am Charlotte Simmons!" is the mantra the brainy freshman from the mountains of North Carolina uses any time she feels insecure, confident, embarrassed, defiant, lonely, self-righteous or confused. Charlotte, the ambitious valedictorian of her backwoods high school and proud possessor of a perfect SAT score, has never fit in with her peers.

They sneer at her aloof intellectualism while she disdains their small-world view of instant gratification through sex and drugs and alcohol and "drag races at night on Route 21." And yet. A part of her yearns to belong, to be accepted and applauded by her classmates. "Why should she be an outcast for not doing stupid, aimless, self-destructive things?"

Charlotte looks forward to vindication, however. Of them all only she will escape into the greater world, where people like herself enjoy "a life of the mind." She has won a full scholarship to prestigious Dupont University, a fictional campus on a par with Harvard or Yale.

Then reality mars her lofty expectations. Unloading their old truck at her new dorm, her proud parents mortify her. Meeting her Groton-educated roommate and Beverly's rich, worldly parents, she instantly sees her family through their eyes. And she with her high-waisted shorts and print dresses and country accent and $500 spending money per semester, feels awkwardly defensive.

But. Charlotte doesn't recognize the name of Beverly's prep school, and when asked where she went to "secondary school," she has to have the term explained. While a young freshman's disavowal of her country connections is regrettably natural, an ambitious teenage girl's total ignorance of prep schools is not. Shortly thereafter, "sexiled" from her dorm room in the wee hours of the morning, Charlotte is shocked by the "pornographic" contents of "Cosmopolitan," a magazine she has never before perused. There are other incidents: jarring moments when this brilliant girl doesn't get some sexual innuendo or boy's intent or a reference to popular culture my granny would recognize. None of these are essential to plot or character, so they just stand there straining Wolfe's credibility.

Which is unfortunate as the reader quickly warms to Charlotte, her timeless story, and Wolfe's exuberant writing. Charlotte adheres to her personal principles while longing desperately for recognition, admiration and "Cool." Many a former college kid will recognize a bit of themselves in Charlotte, a girl quite capable of holding several diametrically opposed passions at the same moment.

She's surrounded by richer, better-educated versions of the crude kids she thought she'd left behind - and they're all cool! A material girl, Beverly (and her friends) regard Charlotte with perfunctory contempt. Classes help counter the misery of social misfitness, however. There she finds the heady life of the mind she longs for, and attracts the attention of "the millennial mutants," a proudly intellectual crew who scorn the ruling ideal of cool.

The mutants are pretty geeky though, and while she enjoys the spirited discussions, Charlotte doesn't really want to be identified with them. She has also attracted the attention of Hoyt Thorpe, the coolest frat boy on campus and Jojo (go go Jojo) Johansson, a major basketball star - though she doesn't at first recognize his status (wouldn't the prestige and fame of Dupont's basketball team have cropped up in her research!?). Trying to have it all ways, Charlotte succumbs to the lure of cool and social ambition and it all ends about as badly as it can.

Wolfe portrays only the extremes of campus life - the dissolute frat boys and elevated sports stars whose status rises with their sexual "score," the defiant radical intellectuals desperate for a cause, the most pompous or incandescent professors, and the crudest coaches. The vast middle embraces the life of the mind and the body, of course, depending on what day of the week it is, but Wolfe has never been interested in the middle.

Point of view veers among characters, so even the odious, egotistical Hoyt acquires a measure of humanity and sympathy and even earnest Charlotte has flaws deeper than vanity. For all that each character is an archetype, each is also an individual and their stories are suspenseful and involving. Subplots involve cheating and campus politics, treated with Wolfe's manic blend of acid humor.

This is the least of Wolfe's novels - indeed, it can't hold a candle to the unforgettable energy of "Bonfire of the Vanities." There's a fair amount of excess verbiage; scenes that go on too long to sustain even Wolfe's manic spin and the crude sexual badinage becomes numbing.

But it's a thoroughly entertaining page-turner, which examines an eternal dilemma. The young social animal suddenly freed from familial authority and oversight, to graze unconstrained on a smorgasbord of ideas and pleasures bears an unprecedented responsibility for herself. Peer pressure and temptation are never stronger than that first year away from home. And in the end the reader who's fallen under Charlotte's beguilingly self-centered sway will long to know what she does next.

Even before I finished this marvelous, utterly engrossing novel, I started to miss it, knowing that it would end soon. The characters were three-dimensional and completely believable, and the story --- for all that it's a comedy of manners --- packs more suspense than the vast majority of thrillers, and drives to a fascinating conclusion.

This is the first time I've read Tom Wolfe. I am also over 50 years old. These facts may help explain my enthusiasm for this book; apparently younger readers have more mixed views. While I don't regard this as an absolutely accurate portrait of modern college life, it rings true in many of its brilliant characterizations, and it's a safe bet that a great deal of it is true.

I found Charlotte to be utterly charming, in her naivete, her as-yet-undirected brilliance, and the forces around her that ultimately force her to discard some of her illusions in order to survive. All of us have to do that at some point in our lives. She reminds me of Voltaire's Candide, the wide-eyed innocent in a sinister and conniving world, and her loneliness and need to belong, somehow, somewhere, touched me deeply.

My college experience was nothing like this. Not only did I graduate thirty years ago, but I grew up in a big city and attended school there. My parents and friends were in the same city. My social life was almost entirely off campus. I never met a football player or a fraternity member. I knew those things existed but they might just as well have been in another universe. I did make several friends in class and shared a kind of "life of the mind" --- the intellectual nirvana that Charlotte Simmons seeks --- but my life was primarily outside school. Still, I can identify with being alone in a crowd, trying to find somewhere to fit in, trying to establish an identity ... and to me, that quest is ultimately what this book is about. Charlotte gets part way there, at the cost of her innocence. But we all pay a price for learning, one way or another.

For starters, Tom Wolfe's latest tome, I Am Charlotte Simmons, is no Bonfire of the Vanities or even Man In Full. It is, however, an incredibly fun and highly engaging read. While critics and readers continue to unfairly lampoon it ad nauseam, I, a self-admitted voracious reader who refuses to allow inane critics and amateur readers to unduly influence my reading selections, have found I Am Charlotte Simmons to be a devastatingly witty and immensely enthralling coming of age novel that, as is Tom Wolfe's custom, defies genre.

Because a square peg fails to fit into a circle hole does not, believe it or not, necessarily make it a failure. In turn, Wolfe's manifest lack of formulaic drivel (unlike the bulk of today's overhyped bestselling authors) makes for a much more unpredictable and free-flowing read. Although long in length, the novel reads quickly and enjoyably from start to finish as we explore the innerworkings of his ever-callow heroine Charlotte Simmons and the many intriguing and incredibly well-characterized individuals ranging from the quasi-maternal high school teacher we all had in Mrs. Pennington, the nerdy liberal friend in Adam, the self-important (yet pensive) jock in Jojo Johanssen(Go Go Jojo!), Beverly(the pretentious roommate we love to hate), and the typical fraternity pissant, Hoyt(Yo, Hoyto!).

In summation, while this is definitely not Wolfe's greatest, it is, however, his latest. If you are anything greater than a cretin, you owe it to yourself to read it. Some people have complained about the vocabulary being too bombastic or verbose. If that's a problem for you, stick with John Grisham.

To paraphrase Michael Barone, our society creates the most inept 18 year-olds and the most super competent 30 year-olds in the world. Tom Wolfe shows us in I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS how incompetent the 18 year olds of today are, in the setting of a prestigious University full of the best and brightest. His third novel should worry parents and enlighten the rest of us.

Those familiar with Wolfe's style of new journalism will appreciate how he uses a combination of subtlety and action to reveal character traits and feelings. Wolfe's characters are funny because they are mostly charlatans, egomaniacs or self-righteous bores. This novel and his last both introduce sympathetic characters and he puts them into a society that doesn't understand their inherent goodness. Wolfe makes his heroes re-think their own values in a world that would just as soon stomp on them.

Charlotte has been given the immense gift of fleeing her poor rural life and living amongst contemporary geniuses. What she assumes will be discussion groups on philosophy and science is, in fact, a campus of frat parties and hooking up. She's isolated and clings to her own small town values, but as her loneliness grows deeper, she compromises little things and later bigger things to better fit in. Wolfe gives us 700 pages to watch Charlotte's strength get sapped by the unforgiving realities of contemporary life.

Along the way we meet jocks, geeks, frat boys, sorority girls, genius professors and radical hippy ones. We meet college coaches and rich parents and famous politicians and very few of them come off looking noble. Wolfe can be salacious when he describes the goings on and it's a big plus for the book, because we can enjoy the description and later feel morally superior to the acts themselves. It's not too unlike how Cecil B. DeMille created biblical epics to get away with all kinds of lasciviousness.

This is an unforgiving look at how modern colleges have adopted ancient Greek Bacchus like behavior, while ignoring the virtuous Socratic philosophy. Some writers may have used this material to endlessly moralize, but Wolfe seems more like one of those ancient Greek Gods laughing from Mount Olympus.

I enjoyed this book. I think my favorite aspect is that Mr. Wolfe takes an 18-year-old female seriously. It seems like in modern society, college girls have become so much of a stereotype or something that they're not that interesting to anybody except themselves (or hungry young men). They are not a subject to be studied by sociologists; they tend to be dismissed. But in this book, Mr. Wolfe takes this population seriously - perhaps more seriously than most girls that age take themselves - and writes an engaging story that will make you step back and think.

This book reminded me a lot of Curtis Sittenfield's PREP, which is a major compliment. I also hear that I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS is being turned into a movie. I'm skeptical that the movie will be able to come close to matching the book. Mr. Wolfe has made this book so much more than some teenage love story, or coming-of-age saga. It's a reflection of American culture, and how our culture impacts young females, from Seven jeans to the pressure to excel academically. Personally, I feel like this book isn't meant to be played out by a Hollywood starlet in front of packed movie theaters. To me, this book is meant to be digested slowly, thoughtfully. Mr. Wolfe takes such a rare approach, that it should be savored.

2 thumbs up.

What is it about Tom Wolfe that annoys mainstream critics so? As was the case with "A Man In Full," and "Bonfire of the Vanities" before it "I Am Charlotte Simmons" has been thoroughly trashed by critics from the New York Times to weekly shoppers in East Bumbleflick, FLorida.

This latest definition of the times in which we live focuses on the generation now matriculating in our nations universities. Set on a fictitious campus bearing an eerie resemblence to Duke,

we are shown what is happening through the lens of an intellectually superior, if socially ignorant scholarship student hailing from the hills of Western North Carolina. Eager to leave her redneck milleau for her idealized university, Charlotte expects to find a place where intellect triumphs over all. What she finds is hipocrisy writ large wherever she turns. Drunken, stoned frat boys who refer to women as "cum dumpsters," a corrupt athletic program, snobs, sociopaths, a promiscuous politician (read Bill Clinton) and agenda driven professors who have long ago forsaken intellectual honesty. She is at first judgemental, but as she succumbs to what she calls her "moral suicide," she finds herself a homeless person in the truest sense of the word. When she returns to her town for Christmas Vacation she realizes it is no longer the refuge she left, and when she returns to school, she remains a stranger in a strange land.

Through it all Wolfe once again nails the customs, mores, speech patterns, dreams, visions and horror of people who are coming of age.

The subtext is dazzling. Charlotte unhinged longs to have the conversation with her soul that her mother told her would allow her to keep her emotional and moral bearings. She believes in this soul with all her heart, but her study of neuroscience tells her the soul is a piece of fiction.

The existential resolution of this dilemna comes at the end of the book where Wolfe adroitly ties together the stories of all the characters.

So how is it the critics hated it? Maybe they are just jealous.

Charlotte Simmons grows up in Sparta, North Carolina. An intelligent child of an ordinary couple, she is blessed with formidable intelligence, teachers who believe in her and cursed with a very limited view of the world. She has one friend her own age and feels shunned by her classmates, especially the boys, because she is different.

Charlotte receives a full-scholarship to the fictional DuPont University, a composite of Ivy League schools.

She seeks intellectual companionship, to live in a world of the mind. And be attractive to boys. But she just doesn't fit in with her Southern mountain country dialect, her strict religiously oriented upbringing and a general lack of what passes these days as wordly sophistication.

In her first few months, Charlotte reaches highs of intellectual stimulation and ambition when her Nobel laureate neuroscience professor praises her work and plumbs the depths of depression when a frivolous frat boy deflowers her.

Wolfe's writing is, as always, superb. The story plays on several levels: the vanity of over-privileged, under-cultured college students; the stupidity of university political correctness; the bizarre emphasis put on college athletics. Through Charlotte, we view all of this through the eyes of a child-woman who desperately wants to be noticed, wants to fit in, but doesn't want to yield an inch from her already conceived view of the world.

Wolfe inteweaves several stories at once. The aspiring nerd jouurnalist, Adam Gellin, who is hopelessly in love with Charlotte, but never quite gets his fantasies realized. Hoyt Thorpe, the airheaded frat boy who sees in himself the world's macho; Jojo Johannson, the athlete in whom Charlotte accidentally sparks a desire to learn.

"I Am Charlotte Simmons" is a metaphor for everyone who has ever been an alert 18 year old in a world where you think there are rules, but haven't yet realized that there really aren't and even if there were, you wouldn't want to play by them.

Wolfe is a master and Charlotte Simmons does not disappoint. I, in fact, hope for a sequel, though I am sure there won't be one.

Jerry

"I am Charlotte Simmons" is a remarkable book, fluidly written, insightful, easy to read, with all Wolfe's keen powers of observation. It describes the unravelling and subjugation of the intellectual drive and ego of a female college student. Charlotte is bowled over by a world where girls see themselves chiefly as coed objects of mindless lust, losing their sense of an identity or personal value that is independent of boys. At the end, the protagonist is not Charlotte Simmons anymore. I would have any girl heading to college read it.

I am Charlotte Simmons is the story of freshman Charlotte Simmons, who coming straight from her tiny town lost in the North Carolina mountains, arrives at Dupont, one of the most prestigious and old established universities in the US. This is a wonderful depiction of ivy league colleges, where we get the insider view on dumb but mega star athletes, frat boys who dictate all that is cool, their hangers on, and the average students who try desperately to fit in by giving in to the binge culture and appearant shallowness. For Charlotte all this comes as a major shock, and she is both attracted to this shiny new world and repulsed by what she sees there. This is an amazingly true depiction of college life, and the torments and dilemmas faced by Charlotte, as well as the attitudes of her fellow students will ring true with most people. I did find that the book got a bit lengthy about 200 pages from the end, but otherwise the pace, wit, humour and intelligence of Tom Wolfe work wonders. There is also a lot of swear words, sex and other "immoral" topics in the book - I think it just made the

whole story more realistic and that it does represent the way college students are nowadays.

With the help of Miss Pennington, her devoted mentor and tutor, Charlotte Simmons' is miraculously able to develop her scholarly gift and graduate from her small western North Carolina high school as class valedictorian. In most cases, graduating as valedictorian from a high school in a town reminiscent of one depicted in, say, 'Deliverance' would not necessarily be an impressive achievement, but pretty and demure Charlotte Simmons is very intelligent. Unfortunately, Charlotte's intelligence quotient is surpassed by her naivete quotient.

When Charlotte arrives at Dupont University, a fictional northeastern campus which is sort a cross between Princeton and Stanford, she finds something other than what she had expected. Instead of discovering the free flow of scholarship among the nation's elite young minds, she need look no further than her roommate, Beverly, to find the typical Dupont student who is mostly a spoiled, wealthy brat - more concerned with drinking and sex than with academics.

Self-conscious about her modest means and extremely sheltered upbringing, Charlotte is overwhelmed by Dupont University and its students. Beverly introduces Charlotte to terms like "sexiled," which in contemporary undergraduate vernacular refers to one's roommate asking (requiring) his or her roommate to sleep elsewhere because of imminent sex with a "pick-up" from a party. Charlotte is horrified. In spite of her inexperience, however, simple and cute little Charlotte still manages to catch the eyes of Jojo, Dupont's star basketball player, Hoyt, the most popular guy in the St. Ray's Fraternity, and Adam, a socially awkward but very clever student who works on the school's newspaper staff. It is the resolution of Charlotte's relationships with the three that conveys the reader through the `I Am Charlotte Simmons.'

Tom Wolfe must have had a lot of fun researching `I Am Charlotte Simmons" because the descriptions of the current college experience are so vivid. Charlotte herself, however, is somewhat overdone as the sweet, innocent country girl. She is portrayed almost Dickensian at times, and therefore is not really credible. How can ANYONE be so immature and ignorant in the information age? Well, apparently Charlotte Simmons can be. As such, it is difficult for the reader to be sympathetic toward Charlotte when things don't go quite right for her.

In spite of the shortcomings of the title character, the subplots of Charlotte's relationships including Jojo's battle to retain his starting spot on a defending national championship basketball team, Hoyt's run-in with the governor of California, and Adam's crises of conscience that involve both Jojo and Hoyt are fun and interesting. However, the reader may sense that Wolfe had gotten pressure from his publisher to produce a finished manuscript, because the resolutions of the subplots as well as Charlotte's trial are abruptly deus ex machina-ed. The reader is left just a little flat.

Sorry, Tom. I have to give the effort no more than a C+. In the era of grade inflation, it's not even as good as it appears.

There haven't been a lot of great American novels about college life. F Scott Fitzgerald wrote a pretty good one, This Side of Paradise. Barely out of Princeton when he published it, his prose still pulses with undergraduate ardor, and his hero, Amory Blaine, is practically a clone of the author. Which is far different than writing a novel of contemporary college life when you're a male NYC sophisticate on the far side of seventy, and, nervier still, centering the bulk of it in the consciousness of an eighteen year old girl fresh from the hills of North Carolina.

But Tom Wolfe never lacked chutzpah. He got on the bus with Ken Kesey in the sixties; he took on the entire modern art establishment in The Painted Word; Bonfire of the Vanities nailed the coffin lid shut on the eighties. Even A Man in Full, despite the weirdness of a factory worker spouting Seneca, got off some good shots on Wolfe's favorite themes: class consciousness and status anxiety.

His singular contribution to American letters has been to spot the building swells of new social trends and carry us along for the ride. Only this wave, the dramas and traumas of student life at an elite private university, peaked, crested and crashed decades ago. With the exception of some riffs on neuroscience and consciousness theory, nothing that happens in this novel was news after 1970.

We follow the rising and declining arcs of four students through half a year at Dupont University (think Duke, and you won't be far off). We have Hoyt, an ultra cool frat boy, Jojo, the token white starter on Dupont's national championship basketball team, Adam, a twitchy Jewish intellectual, and our scholarship girl, Charlotte Simmons, a brainy, dirt-poor, and astoundingly naïve freshman. If this cast sounds somewhat clichéd, it's because they are. The plot revolves around Charlotte's social and sexual awakening. The Life of the Mind she came to Dupont to find can't compete with clambering up the ladder of cool. There are a couple of subplots, one involving fellatio and the Governor of California, another about a basketball player cheating on a term paper. After 600 plus pages - about twice as many as needed - everyone gets their bittersweet comeuppance.

To give the Old Master his due, Wolfe's eye for moments of high status anxiety is still keen. Jojo's contortions as he tries be black enough to fit in with his black teammates without going over the line into parody is one example. The children of the American aristocracy attend Dupont, and their impervious snobbishness drives the meritocratic strivers like Adam mad, because this is one door that talent can't push open.

Maybe there aren't many great college novels because college is one of those times better experienced than described - meaningful only to you and those in the academic trenches with you during your particular era of the culture wars. So do yourself a favor. Get together with some of your college chums. Have a nice nostalgia soak about your days together at good old Whatever U. The experience will be more authentic, rewarding and well spent than using that time to plough through I Am Charlotte Simmons.

When reviewing a book, if I have read previous works by the same author, I cannot help but use those as a basis of comparison. Wolfe is the creator of two great novels I have read in the past, "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man in Full", and the quality of these forces me to say that "I am Charlotte Simmons" is a sub par effort by an author that can deliver so much more. Maybe it is the topic, which centers on how frivolous life in college is for most students, that led the author to write the book in a simple and unpolished way. But even if that was the case, I feel that Tom Wolfe is capable of much more; he set the bar too high previously, and that is part of the reason why he did not pass mustard now.

I have to acknowledge that the story is entertaining, and even though sometimes the author goes into overdrive with the use of the f-word, I believe he is doing that only in order to prove a point about the way things are in the environment in which the novel develops (he spend a considerable amount of time in college campuses around the US doing research). This novel, which is told in a soap-opera tone, is based on the experiences of Charlotte Simmons during her freshman year at Dupont, one of the top universities in the nation (in the book, since it is a fictitious place). Charlotte excels in her studies in a little town in North Carolina and is extremely excited about the prospect of going to such a prestigious university, where surely everyone carries interesting and enlightening conversations and activities focus on the mind.

But reality bites, since Charlotte finds that most people are in a party mood, alcohol is easily obtainable in the dorms and as a result parties are wild, most professors venerate athletes instead of good students, and if an athlete makes an attempt at being serious about his studies, he is put down by his peers. That is the case of Jojo Johanssen, a starter in the team that won the NCAA basketball tournament and a guy that wants to learn other things besides how to play basketball, but who has a hard time dealing with the pressure.

Before starting with the novel, Wolfe presents the conclusions of an experiment by Noble prize winner Prof. Starling, who is a Dupont's scholar. The experiment, which involves cats, concludes that if a group presents a marked behavior due to physical changes, an observant group that lacks the physical characteristics may show the same behavior by imitation. This relates to our story, because Charlotte is not immune to peer pressure, and it is clear from the beginning of the story that we will get to see if she yields to it, following the pattern of the experiment, or if she remains faithful to her convictions without faltering.

As I already mentioned this is a light and entertaining read, so if this is what you are looking for, you will be satisfied. However, if you are looking for the kind of literary efforts Wolfe has presented in the past, you will feel that something is missing.

I enjoyed "Charlotte Smith". I agree its not quite as compelling as "Bonfire of the Vanities", nor is it a ground-breaking work of literature. But it did read like a very good yarn and kept me fully engrossed.

The remarkable aspect of Wolfe`s writing is his ability to make the reader feel the pain and anxiety of his characters. He accomplishes this repeatedly with all the main characters, including the "winners" such as Hoyt and Jojo. And his journalistic approach comes through spectacularly in moments like the St Ray formal, the scene of Charlotte`s "downfall": albeit long, this section was empowered by the detail. Other moments such as the lunch where Charlotte`s family meets her roomate`s also seem longish but I found them enthralling for Wolfe`s detailed (and amusing) portrayal of the characters` behaviors and reactions

Critically for the novel`s enjoyment, while Charlotte is "pathetic", it is not hard, or was not hard for me, to sympathize and root for her and to wish for her a happy ending which she sort of gets, in a very well done non-wishywashy way.

With the help of Miss Pennington, her devoted mentor and tutor, Charlotte Simmons' is miraculously able to develop her scholarly gift and graduate from her small western North Carolina high school as class valedictorian. In most cases, graduating as valedictorian from a high school in a town reminiscent of one depicted in, say, 'Deliverance' would not necessarily be an impressive achievement, but pretty and demure Charlotte Simmons is very intelligent. Unfortunately, Charlotte's intelligence quotient is surpassed by her naivete quotient.

When Charlotte arrives at Dupont University, a fictional northeastern campus which is sort a cross between Princeton and Stanford, she finds something other than what she had expected. Instead of discovering the free flow of scholarship among the nation's elite young minds, she need look no further than her roommate, Beverly, to find the typical Dupont student who is mostly a spoiled, wealthy brat - more concerned with drinking and sex than with academics.

Self-conscious about her modest means and extremely sheltered upbringing, Charlotte is overwhelmed by Dupont University and its students. Beverly introduces Charlotte to terms like "sexiled," which in contemporary undergraduate vernacular refers to one's roommate asking (requiring) his or her roommate to sleep elsewhere because of imminent sex with a "pick-up" from a party. Charlotte is horrified. In spite of her inexperience, however, simple and cute little Charlotte still manages to catch the eyes of Jojo, Dupont's star basketball player, Hoyt, the most popular guy in the St. Ray's Fraternity, and Adam, a socially awkward but very clever student who works on the school's newspaper staff. It is the resolution of Charlotte's relationships with the three that conveys the reader through the `I Am Charlotte Simmons.'

Tom Wolfe must have had a lot of fun researching `I Am Charlotte Simmons" because the descriptions of the current college experience are so vivid. Charlotte herself, however, is somewhat overdone as the sweet, innocent country girl. She is portrayed almost Dickensian at times, and therefore is not really credible. How can ANYONE be so immature and ignorant in the information age? Well, apparently Charlotte Simmons can be. As such, it is difficult for the reader to be sympathetic toward Charlotte when things don't go quite right for her.

In spite of the shortcomings of the title character, the subplots of Charlotte's relationships including Jojo's battle to retain his starting spot on a defending national championship basketball team, Hoyt's run-in with the governor of California, and Adam's crises of conscience that involve both Jojo and Hoyt are fun and interesting. However, the reader may sense that Wolfe had gotten pressure from his publisher to produce a finished manuscript, because the resolutions of the subplots as well as Charlotte's trial are abruptly deus ex machina-ed. The reader is left just a little flat.

Sorry, Tom. I have to give the effort no more than a C+. In the era of grade inflation, it's not even as good as it appears.

There haven't been a lot of great American novels about college life. F Scott Fitzgerald wrote a pretty good one, This Side of Paradise. Barely out of Princeton when he published it, his prose still pulses with undergraduate ardor, and his hero, Amory Blaine, is practically a clone of the author. Which is far different than writing a novel of contemporary college life when you're a male NYC sophisticate on the far side of seventy, and, nervier still, centering the bulk of it in the consciousness of an eighteen year old girl fresh from the hills of North Carolina.

But Tom Wolfe never lacked chutzpah. He got on the bus with Ken Kesey in the sixties; he took on the entire modern art establishment in The Painted Word; Bonfire of the Vanities nailed the coffin lid shut on the eighties. Even A Man in Full, despite the weirdness of a factory worker spouting Seneca, got off some good shots on Wolfe's favorite themes: class consciousness and status anxiety.

His singular contribution to American letters has been to spot the building swells of new social trends and carry us along for the ride. Only this wave, the dramas and traumas of student life at an elite private university, peaked, crested and crashed decades ago. With the exception of some riffs on neuroscience and consciousness theory, nothing that happens in this novel was news after 1970.

We follow the rising and declining arcs of four students through half a year at Dupont University (think Duke, and you won't be far off). We have Hoyt, an ultra cool frat boy, Jojo, the token white starter on Dupont's national championship basketball team, Adam, a twitchy Jewish intellectual, and our scholarship girl, Charlotte Simmons, a brainy, dirt-poor, and astoundingly naïve freshman. If this cast sounds somewhat clichéd, it's because they are. The plot revolves around Charlotte's social and sexual awakening. The Life of the Mind she came to Dupont to find can't compete with clambering up the ladder of cool. There are a couple of subplots, one involving fellatio and the Governor of California, another about a basketball player cheating on a term paper. After 600 plus pages - about twice as many as needed - everyone gets their bittersweet comeuppance.

To give the Old Master his due, Wolfe's eye for moments of high status anxiety is still keen. Jojo's contortions as he tries be black enough to fit in with his black teammates without going over the line into parody is one example. The children of the American aristocracy attend Dupont, and their impervious snobbishness drives the meritocratic strivers like Adam mad, because this is one door that talent can't push open.

Maybe there aren't many great college novels because college is one of those times better experienced than described - meaningful only to you and those in the academic trenches with you during your particular era of the culture wars. So do yourself a favor. Get together with some of your college chums. Have a nice nostalgia soak about your days together at good old Whatever U. The experience will be more authentic, rewarding and well spent than using that time to plough through I Am Charlotte Simmons.

When reviewing a book, if I have read previous works by the same author, I cannot help but use those as a basis of comparison. Wolfe is the creator of two great novels I have read in the past, "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man in Full", and the quality of these forces me to say that "I am Charlotte Simmons" is a sub par effort by an author that can deliver so much more. Maybe it is the topic, which centers on how frivolous life in college is for most students, that led the author to write the book in a simple and unpolished way. But even if that was the case, I feel that Tom Wolfe is capable of much more; he set the bar too high previously, and that is part of the reason why he did not pass mustard now.

I have to acknowledge that the story is entertaining, and even though sometimes the author goes into overdrive with the use of the f-word, I believe he is doing that only in order to prove a point about the way things are in the environment in which the novel develops (he spend a considerable amount of time in college campuses around the US doing research). This novel, which is told in a soap-opera tone, is based on the experiences of Charlotte Simmons during her freshman year at Dupont, one of the top universities in the nation (in the book, since it is a fictitious place). Charlotte excels in her studies in a little town in North Carolina and is extremely excited about the prospect of going to such a prestigious university, where surely everyone carries interesting and enlightening conversations and activities focus on the mind.

But reality bites, since Charlotte finds that most people are in a party mood, alcohol is easily obtainable in the dorms and as a result parties are wild, most professors venerate athletes instead of good students, and if an athlete makes an attempt at being serious about his studies, he is put down by his peers. That is the case of Jojo Johanssen, a starter in the team that won the NCAA basketball tournament and a guy that wants to learn other things besides how to play basketball, but who has a hard time dealing with the pressure.

Before starting with the novel, Wolfe presents the conclusions of an experiment by Noble prize winner Prof. Starling, who is a Dupont's scholar. The experiment, which involves cats, concludes that if a group presents a marked behavior due to physical changes, an observant group that lacks the physical characteristics may show the same behavior by imitation. This relates to our story, because Charlotte is not immune to peer pressure, and it is clear from the beginning of the story that we will get to see if she yields to it, following the pattern of the experiment, or if she remains faithful to her convictions without faltering.

As I already mentioned this is a light and entertaining read, so if this is what you are looking for, you will be satisfied. However, if you are looking for the kind of literary efforts Wolfe has presented in the past, you will feel that something is missing.

I enjoyed "Charlotte Smith". I agree its not quite as compelling as "Bonfire of the Vanities", nor is it a ground-breaking work of literature. But it did read like a very good yarn and kept me fully engrossed.

The remarkable aspect of Wolfe`s writing is his ability to make the reader feel the pain and anxiety of his characters. He accomplishes this repeatedly with all the main characters, including the "winners" such as Hoyt and Jojo. And his journalistic approach comes through spectacularly in moments like the St Ray formal, the scene of Charlotte`s "downfall": albeit long, this section was empowered by the detail. Other moments such as the lunch where Charlotte`s family meets her roomate`s also seem longish but I found them enthralling for Wolfe`s detailed (and amusing) portrayal of the characters` behaviors and reactions

Critically for the novel`s enjoyment, while Charlotte is "pathetic", it is not hard, or was not hard for me, to sympathize and root for her and to wish for her a happy ending which she sort of gets, in a very well done non-wishywashy way.

Two people I know loudly ridiculed this book when I told them I had it in my mitts. Neither had read it but they had formed strong opinions based on hearsay and reviews, I guess. Both are well-educated, that is through university and high-level workforce. They may as well have been looking in a mirror, given the background of the major characters in I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS. It is interesting that this satire drew such a negative reaction under the circumstances. This speaks strongly for Tom Wolfe and his subject matter.

Charlotte Simmons is the most outstanding student in a small hillbilly (Wolfe's term) North Carolina town who yearns for big things from Dupont University. She arrives at the doorstep of higher education as all good Candide-like characters do, innocent as a lamb, unsuspecting of others, and painfully aware of her humble background and lack of class. At Dupont she is brutalized socially, physically, sexually and emotionally but emerges slightly stronger and wiser for all her troubles. A small cast of characters are changed and affected by Charlotte's association, the most significant of which is Jojo the star basketball player who unwittingly yearns for something more than a winning basketball game. The rest of the major players are brilliantly over-exaggerated: her anorexic roommate, the self-centred suave immoral frat boy and his fellow frat brothers, their girls, the smart-but-awkward political activist male virgin, the university professors, and the basketball coach and his players.

From the outset it's apparent Tom Wolfe has no respect or hope for the current generation of university students, their lifestyle or concerns. In fact, he writes like a grumpy old man looking at the new generation and all but does the "in my day, things were different..." outrage line. He pulls no punches, he exaggerates outrageously, he overwrites, he's obsessed with the oversexed health and drive of the student generation, and he is frustrated with university politics. All of which makes for a dynamic novel, full of delicious descriptions, good plot and great details. I was never bored and always curious as to what was on the next page.

As a result, this was an entertaining and fantastic page-turner which game me hours of pleasure. Who wants a rational argument about the state of education in the US, or the corruption of university objectives? Give me a good, well-written biased novel any day. Bravo!

As usual Tom Wolfe holds up a Flaubertian mirror to contemporary American society. It isn't an exactly clear and accurate picture of course but the distortions only serve to enlarge the truths and they are not flattering to many contemporary Americans as we can see from the reactions in many of the reader reviews. The moral sewer of Dupont, the fictional prestige university he paints, the sickening political correctness, the basketball jock pandering (the football team is ignored, just the tailgate party scene), are perhaps overdone but the reaction from some campus journalists as opposed to outsiders who don't really know what is going on has been one of grudging admission of a certain reality which surprised me.

One faculty reaction at Princeton didn't like the book because of its failure to properly advance the feminist revolution of all things and tried to put Wolfe down for his supposedly plebian background (and wrongly if that matters), which I'm glad to see brought quite proper denuniciations of snobbery from Princeton students or alum! Another amazingly stupid comment in a journalistic review said that Wolfe erred in failing to recognize the woman liked sex as much as men. Talk about confirmation of his theme!

If the novel had a flaw it was the flat ending. The characters who had real human appeal (Wolfe is a great writer in engaging readers with his characters) are left hanging, empty, for me anyway. And I doubt he'll write a sequel. In spite of his obvious support for decency as opposed to the philistine, sex-obsessed campus picture with which we are bombarded (which annoys many philistine, sex-obsessed readers) and his hints that there are other kinds of students at Dupont we never come into contact with them in his warm writing way (apparently they're in the library as we pass by) and none of the characters have any seeming personal religious beliefs, not even Charlotte in spite of her background. My own experience is that they are there, even at Dupont, and they are not the simple dummies of the neo-pagan dreams. Wolfe just says in passing that students with such beliefs are the only really unacceptable people at Dupont and leaves it at that. As one magazine reviewer said, "Don't they have a Newman Club at Dupont?". Apparently not or maybe it wouldn't have fit in Wolfe's story.

I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe's new novel, has been...well, less than enthusiastically received, shall we say, by many people. Most of them focus on the fact that the plot is not quite as insightful and meaningful as that of Bonfire of the Vanities or A Man In Full, which is probably a fair criticism, although reviews that say "this isn't as good as their previous work" or "this is better than their previous work" don't really do so much for me, personally. The plot, about a young innocent girl who expects college to be about learning instead of about big time athletics and big time debauchery, is cliche, there's no doubt about that, although some of the directions it take and many of the subplots and minor characters are really interesting and break the stereotypes (though I'm not so sure about the ending...)

The other criticism people seem to have of the novel is that it isn't shocking or surprising that -- gasp -- there is a lot of sex and drinking on our college campuses! And that Wolfe's insights into campus life are not as stunning as readers would like. Now, I didn't read Bonfire until more than a decade after it came out, so maybe it was stunning and shocking when it was released, but I have to say that by 1999 it was not especially stunning or shocking. In fact, the portrayal of Wall Street and Upper East Side life, not to mention the life of a reporter or of the courtroom, was actually a bit cliche and was certainly not the thing that made me enjoy the book. No, I enjoyed it due to its elaborate well-woven plot and Wolfe's ability to write engrossing situatons -- both of which are present in Simmons.

The other main criticism of the book is that Wolfe, as a 70-year old man is a bit clunky with the slang and the situations that the kids today use. My response to this is to wonder how the reviewers know this. I am a college professor and as such I spend most of my days on a college campus, and I don't even know what all the slang is. Whether or not the slang is accurate, Wolfe clearly has a fascination with the lingo and the language (much as he has in his other writing) and makes it very interesting to read, and as long as he does this, I'm not actually as worried about the accuracy (even though I know he would be)

In the end, I think that the book is one that is easy to get engrossed in, but not one that is destined to be a classic. Twenty years from now when people look back on Wolfe's career they will still talk mostly about Bonfire of the Vanities and Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff, and skip over this book entirely. But that doesn't mean that it isn't worth reading, especially if you are a fan of Wolfe's. The real question is whether it is worth spending the time (and the hassle, as it is not exactly a subway book or a gym book) to read the 660 pages? I definitely thought so, but I can see where others may not.

If you take the journey through Tom Wolfe's book, Charlotte Simmons will be one of those characters that stick with you long after you put the book down. I was never under the impression that this book was intended to be an accurate account of university life and politics in the 2000's, although it appears that many of its readers seem to have the desire for it to be so, which may have left some disappointed or even seemingly angry.

While Wolfe's depiction of university life is certainly augmented a bit, the portrait of Dupont is not so different from many colleges and universities (especially small private schools) in the United States. I myself am a 2007 graduate and I was taken aback with the incredible capability Wolfe has to capture the smallest details in order to really draw the reader into the story. It didn't take me many pages before I felt the familiar feeling of my parents helping me move my stuff into my dorm freshman year. In many ways, I wondered if I, too, wasn't Charlotte Simmons sometimes during my own experience.

Wolfe is very perceptive, and I don't think the author's age or gender should be an issue. As far as I'm concerned, this book could have been written by a young female and I wouldn't have blinked an eye. Admittedly, some terminology Wolfe uses seems a little odd to me, but each author has their own hang ups and style of writing, so I didn't think much of it at all. The book isn't flawless, and characters tend to be stereotypical but it makes for a fun fun funny read.

It's a big book, but I became so engrossed in the beautiful detail and character development of the book that I sailed through it. I came to love Charlotte Simmons, and it is definitely one I recommend to anyone who enjoys a great read. This was my first Tom Wolfe novel. I ran across a copy of Hooking Up recently, which is certainly next on my reading list.

As a female reader, the premise of Charlotte Simmons, a young girl from the "hillbilly" Sparta, NC, thrust into the ultra selective Dupont University near Philadelphia, was very appealing. I graduated college in 2001 and graduate school in 2003, so the initial publication of Charlotte wasn't that long after my undergraduate days.

Although the premise appealed to me, it took me three tries before I read most of the novel. The first time, in 2007, I stopped reading after the introductory chapter on Jojo and the basketball team. The second time, in late 2012, I tried again, only making it to the part where Charlotte loses her nerve to use the co-ed bathroom on her dormitory floor.

But only a few days ago, in late July 2013, I tried Charlotte again. And I mostly persevered. I read 3, 4, and 5 star reviews so I could learn how to navigate through Charlotte's experience at Dupont. (I RECOMMEND everyone do this, especially if they can't "get into it" right away.) I knew two things 1) Charlotte would lose her virginity and 2) she would wind up with Jojo. Eventually, after the devleopment of Jojo, Hoyt, Beverly, and Adam, and how Charlotte relates to them, I wanted to cut to the chase and learn how she lost her virginity, as this was apparently the turning point in the novel. I started making predictions- who was the lucky guy? Jojo, Hoyt, Harrison, Adam, P.I., Vance, Congers, Starling, Buster, other Millenial Mutants, other basketball players??? Wolfe gave us many possibilities.... maybe she had a run in with Channing????

After reading about Adam and the Millenial Mutants debate on "coolness", I couldn't bear to trudge along through these scenes. I skipped ahead, skimming large chunks. I learned how Charlotte was set up to lose her virginity, the actual experience (skimmed that, too) and the consequences of her choice in partner.

Sad consequences, indeed. And the fall-out was predictable. I skimmed ahead to see what happened next. Didn't much care for her trip back to Sparta, her interactions with Adam really showed who she was: he comforts her when she needs him, but she can't reciprocate when he needs her, and that's not for her lack of trying!!! (That shows how much a jerk she really could be. And I originally took Charlotte's side when she overheard Mimi and Bettina discussing her. After what Charlotte did to Adam, not so much!)

And the end... I'm happy for Adam. Hoyt's ending was also predictable. Charlotte's was very silly. I rolled my eyes when I read about her interactions with Buster, Eugenia, and the others. Her relationship with Jojo is believable, because the guy really did like her, but it seemed to be moving too fast, with "Char" doing a complete 180. Did she sell-out to find love?

Three stars for Wolfe giving me a lot to think about. This was my first Tom Wolfe novel, and it won't be my last. I will be reading Bonfire of the Vanities and Back to Blood in the near future. I am Charlotte Simmons did have its moments, and I really did care about this book. It was too long and started to become uninteresting, and a bit of it was predictable and sometimes, downright silly.

As a current college student at a prestigious university that is regularly heralded as 'sports-oriented' I found the book to hit close to home on a number of counts. However, the nature of my school and its lack of Greek life made other parts of the book seem like reading an expose on some other culture entirely. His portrayal of the common student, from language to class attitude to social anxiety, made great points in their extremeness and exaggeration.

As for plot, after a while the prose read less like a novel and more like just a friend's rehash of her own bad first semester at school. Interesting, but certainly not 'deep revelation' interesting. The ending partially validated a somewhat slow middle, and I am still struggling to both determine who the main protagonist truly is and thus whether this is a tragedy or comedy of college life.

If you're well out of college, fear not, much of this story is an exaggeration to make a point. Though at some point in college, I feel everyone will experience all of these events first- or second-hand.

Could have been so much more by being less...

There is so much to love about this book that it pains me to give this novel only 3 stars. After all, I have dove into this novel as a certain Charlotte Simmons dove into her "Madame Bovary" book! I was intrigued, for this novel reads like so much more than just a "fiction" book. Wolfe's non-fiction background is apparent from the first pages. On the publisher's information page, "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is classified as, in this order, "1. Women college-students...2. Difference (Psychology)...3.Social classes...4.Race relations...5.Young women, and this book can be seen as so much more as well.

The reason I could not give more than a lukewarm 3 starts, however, lies in the reason that Wolfe, in attempting to shed a light on of all that is wrong in today's university system and of the system's pandering to fraternities, student-athletes, boosters, egotistical faculty-coaches-presidents, Wolfe forgot to bring some order to the chaos that builds over 700+ pages; he forgot the most important rule of the fiction writer; that is, he forgot to humanize, or even flesh-out, the characters that he so nonchalantly parades through the pages.

One of the many subplots involve a tutor being investigated for giving too much help to a student-athlete. This student, desperate for this incident to be swept under the rug, must align with one of two sides: the stiff, self-righteous, athlete-hating history professor, or the bull-headed, intellectual-hating head coach of the highly successful university basketball team. Readers get the sense that these two men, dissimilar as they may seem, care more about preserving their own careers and promoting their own idealistic vision of what a university should be than they do about the fate of the student who is stuck in the middle; by using his "students" in this story so carelessly, Wolfe is performing an injustice as grave as the one he presented in the aforementioned subplot. Wolfe has let the readers down in an attempt to promote his own vision of modern universities.

Thanks to Wolfe's powerful prose, a number of vivid characters, and the social commentary about the modern college experience, I enjoyed this novel despite myself. Presumably the reader is supposed to realize that Wolfe is not trying to provide a balanced picture of college life. Chapter 16 exemplifies Wolfe's prose: he immerses the reader into a few minutes of a basketball game in a tour de force worthy of the best first person combat account. On a lighter, although sad touch, who can forget the trolls, Simmons' dorm mates sitting in a row in the hall.

Charlotte is not very likable and she is rebelling against two things which are confounded: a set of values, and a lack of money. By page 643 she can hardly bare to touch a blanket which is so "cheaply synthetic".

Mr. Wolfe is a wonderful writer, obviously a scholar, and a great way of illustrating the follies and hypocrisies of us all. The story is generally fun but it is needlessly long, the subject dated (although still needing review and consideration), and stuffed too much with the writer's ego who is anxious to prove to us how smart he is.

Finally I find one major flaw. His main character is a naive North Carolina "genius" with a fundamentalist upbringing who is exposed to the sex and drinking of college and almost ruined because of it. During all this, to maintain the appearance of Charlotte's innocence, we are led to believe that up till this point she has had no sexual curiosity, no self sexual exploration (not even masturbation), and never gets horny. In other words she is an unrealistic SuperWoman. Her fundamentalist upbringing is also only hinted at without mentioning the hang-ups, insecurities, paranoia, and bible reading that comes with it.

Mr. Wolfe isn't "smart" enough to realize you can have sexual feelings, acknowledge them (even enjoy them), and even play with yourself without being promiscuous or a drunk. In other words he tried to write about the "fictional" character of choice from the 1950's and tried to merge her with Animal House. This heavy handedness takes away the impact this book could and should have.

There were many elements of this book that made me want to speed through to the ending - I wanted to know what happened to Charlotte in the end. As such, there were a lot of typical Tom Wolfe details that I skipped through. Perhaps there is a lot of importance in details but I doubt I missed anything by not paying attention to every nitty gritty little spec of dust.
However, one of things that really impressed me was how he captured Charlotte's lonliness and confusion at being in a new environment. I was not raised in a sheltered environment like Charlotte but reading this reminded me of how it felt to be a college freshman, away from home and not sure of how you fit into this new scene. I disagree with folks who can't imagine that there could be a character so naive in the new millenium. There are still pockets of America that are untouched, perhaps even better described as unspoiled. After all, Charlotte's unaware parents seemed pretty happy with their lives. Being at the crossroads is what made Charlotte so miserable.
This book concludes that you have to find a role in college, a microcosm of life. Some "roles" are better than others; frat boy, sorority girl, jocks. The internal battle between how Charlotte, a social outcast saw herself being above "the nerd," and not wanting to embarrass herself or equate herself with one. She wanted the rich intellectual life but she didn't click with the folks who wanted to live the life of the mind. Again, I saw a little bit of myself in this battle. I went to a small liberal arts college that had no Greek system but the same social constructs still existed.
So, even though I was transported back to some of the feelings I had in my college days, I still wished it was shorter and the conclusion more satisfying. I am not sure how he should have ended it better, but I just felt short changed.

Oh, and do college age folks really use the words, "Mon pubis," over and over and over again?