Veo que hay opiniones de todo tipo con respecto a Charlotte Simmons. Yo lo único que tengo que recriminarle ala historia es el final en sí, porque esperaba otra cosa, aunque no me disgusta. Es un libro largo, sí, LO ES. Pero yo lo he disfrutado cada página. Creo que la traducción es buenísima, aunque imagino que en inglés será todavía mejor. He aprendido mucho leyendo el libro, tanto de la sociedad estudiantil americana, como de recursos literarios por la narrativa del autor. Sin duda, es uno de mis referentes desde ahora.

Hace varios años leí 'Soy Charlotte Simmons', el retorno a la novela de un famoso cronista del zeitgeist. Años después de haber escrito aquella sátira de la superficial y obsesiva sociedad de los ochenta que fue The Bonfire of the Vanities, el señor Wolfe se fue a meter a una universidad de Ivy League para hacerse una idea de la vida estudiantil de la sociedad actual. Y por supuesto, contar una historia mordaz sobre ella.

El resultado termina siendo una de aquellas novelas que pudo haber sido mucho más si tan sólo hubiera sabido qué quería ser. Si una sátira hecha y derecha o la verdadera apreciación de un viejito de cómo estudian y cómo son las juventudes de hoy.

De que sí, la historia es graciosísima. Se trata de una chica de alguna de las Carolinas, bastante pobre (nivel 'dirt poor') pero bastante inteligente que se gana una beca para estudiar en prestigiosa y ficticia Universidad de Dupont. El resto de la novela cuenta su gradual y atropellado descubrimiento de un ambiente de decadencia sexual, de fiestas salvajes, de corrupción política, de influyentismo de los patrocinadores de la universidad, de conflictos de raza y clase, de petulancia académica y pseudo-intelectualidad podrida.

Los otros tres personajes principales son quienes en algunos puntos de la trama se convierten en los amores de Charlotte. Todos como representantes de la 'juventud en éxtasis' de un país en aquel interludio 2001-2008 en que estuvo la mayor parte de mi vida pre-universitaria y universitaria.

Uno, Jojo, es un 'jock' bastante descerebrado, cuya transformación va encaminada a ponerse las pilas en la escuela y en la cancha so pena de perder su lugar en la selección de basket a un joven negro. Otro, quien podría pasar como el villano de la historia, es Hoyt: un cuate no-tan-bien que se convierte en frat boy y donjuán creyendo que pasándola bomba en la universidad es el camino para conseguirse un trabajo en Wall Street. Y por último Adam, un destacado estudiante judío que se siente el último baluarte de la intelectualidad en medio del desenfreno de Dupont.

Uno de mis errores fue leerlo en español. Su traducción era peninsular, así que hube de pasar seiscientas páginas entre modismos de 'guay' y similares. Es mejor leerlo en inglés y sentir el verdadero color del lenguaje. La mayoría de los episodios son hilarantes, incluso desde el principio, con la historia de un gobernador de California que tiene aventuras en el campus. Wolfe ganó incluso un premio a 'mal sexo en ficción' debido a cierto pasaje que, en atención a no dar spoilers, es como el clímax de la novela.

This book kept me turning the pages but ultimately was pretty lame. Also, Tom Wolfe is a perv
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Tom Wolfe is of the opinion that the novel, while still able to be subjected to literary and intellectual criticism, is nevertheless in a declining state as a strict form of entertainment, which is arguably its chief function when stripped of the more partisan and progressive causes that motivate some early, as well as many contemporary, novelists. People seem to take for granted the profound effect novels have on societies and on culture as being premeditatively instigated by the authors themselves; that an author can simultaneously be inspired to heights of literary creativity, even as he/she tailors that creativity and perspicacity for words into a force of nature capable of effecting social change. Wolfe isn't Upton Sinclair, though. He's Balzac. Or better yet, Dickens: for his moral sense definitely shines through and occupies a distinct presence; but the vivacity of his prose, his biting and at times keel-over-laughing wit, and the brooding sensation that in every character is somehow, inexplicably, a bit of your own self that you've thought you could deny or brush under the table, erasing all evidence but the hastily scrawled marginalia notes confirming the notion that you the reader could in any way be as pathetic as some of the characters are at times reduced to . . . well, let's just say that this tremendously acute liveliness and organic quality to Wolfe's social insight is never at war with his moral sense. Like Dickens, Wolfe understands that having a morality, or a conscience, doesn't mean denying that there are forces that oppose your conscience, or that the human conscience is in any way the sole force governing human behavior.

In fact, "I Am Charlotte Simmons" goes far--VERY far--towards illustrating the myriad motivations and complex matrices of desires, mysteriously mimetic as well as morosely myopic, that energize behavior at the peak of adulthood, i.e. the ages of 18-22; as well as showing that such desires reverberate throughout all of life from that point onward, so much so that all your adult decisions, whether made when you're 30, 50, or 70, are in some way a reminiscence of that time of your life.

None of these characters are stereotyped; all are complex. In high school, Hoyt Thorpe is an underprivileged teenager deprived of a father-figure who nevertheless becomes a prodigious social activist who makes national headlines for his mission to provide food for homeless urbanites, but he uses that prestige to help him gain entrance into the prestigious Ivy League Dupont University. Once there, he proceeds to become--at once--every college girl's worst nightmare and dream come true. As if the pendulum between his character's attributes isn't already in full sway, amidst his bacchanalian exploits and carefully habituated insouciance he harbors deep-set insecurities, if not outright denial, of his unfortunate and imminent predicament, that once he graduates, his dismal transcript virtually precludes his possibility of employment in a Wall Street investment banking firm. This is no stereotypical college male; this is THE college male of an East Coast Ivy. This is the postmodern F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, a Fitzgerald redux, albeit in a douchefied and decidedly less-literarily bent persona--all of which compounds upon the effect, the haunting familiarity that Hoyt Thorpe possesses from both a literary standpoint like this, i.e. the "postmodern" (term used loosely) inheritor of an East Coast prep legacy, and also the familiarity he has for the male gender more generally: for what we are, what we want to or have wanted to be, what college turned us into, what we tried to become, or what we've tried to resist acknowledging about ourselves. A character who can inspire such a myriad of psychological resemblances is in no way static. Indeed, his complexity screams at the reader from multiple angles, making his story as enticing as that of Wolfe's protagonist, Charlotte herself. Just imagine if the depth of Charlotte's own personality were to be examined in suit (it is).

One final note. I do not believe it's too much of a generalization to say that any novel has the potential to hold a particular resonance, a specific form of entertainment value, for every different reader. To read this novel today, in this year, and while between the ages of 18 and 24, is to identify with it on a different level than an older audience. The professional reviews (I've read several) of this novel are/were composed by tremendously intelligent people WHO ARE, NEVERTHELESS, NECESSARILY PRECLUDED FROM ENGAGING WITH AND EXPERIENCING THE EFFECT OF THIS NOVEL ON AN IDEAL LEVEL, BY VIRTUE OF THEIR NOT BEING, IN THIS DAY, IN THEIR LATE TEENS OR THEIR TWENTIES. If I were to have taken the advice of these reviewers (with the exception of one or two) I would not have read this book, and the 20 minutes I spent in Barnes & Noble silently debating whether or not to buy it, would have ended in me walking out of the store empty handed. I cannot claim that some kind of rebellious tendency to prove the reviewers wrong incited me to go ahead with the purchase, and quite contrastingly, I was very much inclined to take the larger critical consensus and devote my hours towards some other literary endeavor. The two reasons I walked out of the store with the seventeen dollar copy of "I Am Charlotte Simmons" were, firstly, that I read the prologue (instantly gripping), and more importantly, that I am 23 years old, a fresh university graduate, nostalgic for the past while excited for the future. Thus, at this particular moment in my life, a novel like "I Am Charlotte Simmons," that is hilariously haunting and has an emotionally macabre familiarity to the life I've recently bid farewell too, has an appeal to me like it never had before, and never will have again. I doubt any of the professional reviewers can claim such a personal literary resonance with this novel, though I hope they can claim it with SOME novel, because the experience is one of tremendous sublimity. I suppose that the stars aligned, as it were, and things just happened to work out for me in a way that ensured that I would engage with THIS novel on a deeper and more emotionally personal level than most others. I graduated from UCLA; I came across this book on wikipedia; bought it a few weeks later after much deliberation; laughed my fucking ass off; seared my soul to those of these characters; learned about myself and about the world I've just left; learned about the world I'm going in to; loved every goddamn minute of it. Reviews for this novel have been lukewarm at best, and I can't really refute them (or I can, but it would require multiple essays, some of which I may perhaps write in the future), and thus, I can't truly convince anyone whose not in my position to read this book. But this is my book. It's about me. It describes me in a way that I never thought possible. So it's my favorite book. The stars aligned. Who would've thought.

I hated this book so much and hauling it around felt like hauling a brick around. So much of it felt so unnecessarily repetitive, especially with the writing style (we get it, she has an accent! We get it, people shout sometimes!)

Every single character acts like they’re hot shit, especially Charlotte, but truly I have never encountered a more annoying cast. Charlotte loves to act like she’s hot shit and better than everyone else that honestly when bad things happen to her it feels delightfully a little karmic.

TLDR: way too long and is a lifetime movie rant about how elite colleges are bad

Halfway through Tom Wolfe's enormous new novel about contemporary college life, I finally devised a question to keep my interest piqued: "Is it humanly possible," I wondered, "to write another 100 pages - another 200 pages, another 300 pages - without describing a single surprising event?"

It is.

With "I Am Charlotte Simmons," Wolfe has ventured onto the university campus and sent back reams of hyperventilating testimony: College students are slovenly and crude. They drink way too much. They listen to obscene music. They engage in casual and exploitative sex. They put their feet on the furniture - even leather sofas and fine woodwork.

But wait, there's more: College students would rather socialize than study. It's all right here, spelled out in tones of amazement, like George H.W. Bush telling us about those new scanners at the grocery store.

If you haven't seen "Animal House" or anything on the WB, you'll be surprised to learn that collegiate society is divided between "jocks" and "nerds." The jocks are very athletic, but not very smart, whereas the nerds are very smart, but not very athletic.

Am I going too fast?

To write this novel, Wolfe claims that he "had only to reassemble the material he had accumulated visiting campuses across the country," a technique that may explain the book's superficiality. This isn't the anthropology of the Ordinary - a potentially revelatory approach; it's just a dramatization of clichés.

Even the style lacks Wolfe's usual verve. He's particularly interested in the way modern Americans talk, but in his Rip Van Winkle voice, we get endless explanations and reenactments of what he calls the "undergraduate vocabulary," a discovery he highlights in a brief dedication to his children. Most of the dialogue is written in a profane patois that Wolfe spells out as though he's recording the grunts and clicks of a lost dialect from Inner Mongolia. But he has nothing to add to Norman Mailer's far more daring analysis of American profanity some 40 years ago in "Armies of the Night."

Even more tedious than the affected slips of Southern and African-American dialects are his needless parenthetical translations: I can't (cain't) stand them('em). And when characters yell at each other, their words are written in caps so that we know THEY'RE SPEAKING VERY LOUDLY.

The story follows the rise and fall of Charlotte Simmons, a brilliant country bumpkin from Sparta, N.C., (pop. 900), who wins a scholarship to Dupont University, one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. Charlotte's parents are simple folk, devout Christians, who have instilled in their daughter a deep sense of morality. They don't drink, swear, put on airs, or take no stock in your highfalutin citified ways. Along with a devoted teacher at school, they have instilled in Charlotte a sense of her exceptionalism that inspires the novel's title, which is also a sort of inspirational mantra for the heroine.

Charlotte heads off to Dupont University expecting to enter the august halls of academe, but she quickly finds that it's a brothel, seething with vain, vicious girls and crude, drunken boys. Her snobby roommate won't have anything to do with her. The coed bathrooms are an abomination. Athletes on the basketball team don't take their classes seriously. And hunky frat boys pretend to be interested in your mind, but they're interested in only one thing. (I won't spoil it for you.)

Poor Charlotte is consumed with loneliness and confusion. Everyone mocks her clothes, her naiveté, her virginity, her tee-totaling. Professors recognize her brilliance, but brilliance doesn't matter in this marketplace of drunken flesh. So, how can she resist when the hottest boy on campus asks her to the Spring Formal? (Wolfe Note: The term "hottest" is not a reference to the temperature of his body, but to the developed musculature of his body, which, along with a number of male bodies in this book, is described with slobbering attention.)

Meanwhile, one of the nerds who works for the school paper (where else?) is pursuing a scandal that could rock American politics, but don't worry about that potentially interesting thread; it never leads off campus - or toward anything.

The only issue that develops some traction in this novel is race. Wolfe explored that more profoundly in "The Bonfire of Vanities" and "A Man in Full," but his portrayal here of the racial tensions on the college basketball court is engaging. He shows a sport played largely by black men for the entertainment of white fans in an academic setting that contorts its principles to keep the whole industry going.

The cynical coach reaps millions; the pasty professor growls about academic standards; the expedient college president maintains an uneasy truce. All these characters play to type, but at the center of this subplot is a white basketball star who feels threatened by the talent and aggression of black players all around him. Why, he wonders, do they have access to a whole range of words and stances that are forbidden to him? What's more, he's starting to feel attracted to a life of the mind that he can just barely imagine. But this minor development is buried in a variety of borrowed plot lines, including a climactic bit of satire about political correctness that might have been sharp 20 years ago.

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

Wolfe wrote a much discussed essay for Harper's in 1989, "A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel." Instead of the cerebral games that now pass for fiction, he argued, American novelists should "head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property." This is good advice. When he took it, he hog-stomped out two baroque novels, first about New York and then about Atlanta. But cooped up on campus with "Charlotte Simmons" he's too predictable and too late to reclaim anything of interest.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1109/p1...

Certainly not one of Wolfe's best. The book really began well for me and drew me into the Charlotte Simmons story of a young girl from the mountains of North Carolina going to this highly rated liberal arts university in Pennsylvania. A fish out of water type story, and once there this book bogged down for me. Maybe I am too familiar with colleges and all that goes on there, but the book just did not move me and we always just sitting there and I had a hard time returning again and again to the book. As with all of Wolfe's novels they are extremely well written which, for me, is the only reason I gave it a 3***. Again, not his best and maybe not as bad as the reviewers have said for years, but certainly not what you expect from Wolfe.

One of my all-time favorite books. It has its flaws, but I loved it when I read it for the first time back in 2005, and I love it just as much every time I re-read it.

"I am Tom Wolfe... " and therefore I can write whatever I want. And people will still buy my over-long, thinly-developed, poorly-constructed tirade against 'kids these days.'

It's called a stereotype, Tom. You should probably avoid making all your characters painfully simple cardboard cutouts of actual people. And I'm pretty sure I've seen all of these before, in EVERY movie and book about "college" ever produced.

To inventory:
- The main protagonist, the archetypical smart girl who's better looking than she realizes.
- The big dumb jock who's smarter than he realizes
- The beautiful-but-evil roommate
- The nerdy reporter for the school paper
- The obnoxious, privileged frat boy
- And a whole host of minor supporting characters... as the secretary from Ferris Bueller put it, a cast of "sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, and d!ckheads." Along with rednecks, the new england rich, and a smattering of other cellophane-thin stereotypes.

This book isn't quite satire, it isn't quite commentary, isn't remotely insightful, but it is awfully long. It has that going for it.

This book was like a nemesis for me over the last few weeks I've been reading it. So many times I wanted to just put it down and forget I'd ever seen it, but then when I mentioned it to people I got this reaction like "what? Tom Wolfe? He's the best!" and so my curiosity piqued, I'd pick it back up. Now after careful consideration I have crafted the following critique. Note I have only ever attempted one other Tom Wolfe book (Electric Kool-aid Acid Test) and didn't make it all the way through. But here are my thoughts on Charlotte Simmons as it's own unique piece of work:

Writing Style

Now people tell me that Tom Wolfe is this great writer. Reading this book though, I do NOT see it. It reads to me like a young author who is so hell-bent on sounding impressive, and hasn't yet learned how to edit. Some of that could be taste, I definitely enjoy a "show me" versus "tell me" style of writing, but I would argue that this critique is objectively true as well. Here are three key things I disliked about the writing:

1. Colloquialism: I honestly don't mind colloquial dialogue in a novel. Done well (Twain) it can be a great device to further seed the reader's imagination with who this character is. Done right. To me, that means consistent. When not done consistently, it can read as a mockery (see points below re:racism.) If you're going to say someone says "dat" instead of "that" then it is unlikely that they also say "it does not" in the same sentence. "Dat's not wot we do, it does not work" - see how that actually doesn't sound anything like what a real person with that colloquial language style would say? It's because the first half is one way and the second half forgets about it. I'd also say, if you're going to write colloquially, do it, don't half do it and then have the narrator fix the other half? Like "'That's riioght, we're with them' they-am." Why not just put 'they-am' in the original quote? Why remind me how bad you are at this?

2. Big words for the sake of big words: now, I realize that some of the characters in this novel were big word people. That's fine. Put it in their dialogue. We'll get to this more in the narration section, but big words don't fit when you're in the POV of the "dumb jock" but all of a sudden his thoughts read like a poet laureate wrote them?

3. Treating me like an idiot: give your readers some kind of dignity. There was one point where two girls ACTUALLY had a conversation about what sarcasm was and what the different levels were and this went on for 3 pages. Give me a break. I didn't need that, the characters doing it (sorority girls) didn't need that - they were born knowing that. What is this? I physically rolled my eyes during that section it was so bad.

Narrator

That last point actually rolls into another big gripe - the narrator. Man. It's like this guy has never read a narrated book before. There are two main types of narrators, the omnipotent narrator (knows all, sees all, is just reporting in third person) and the personal narrator (an actual character, reports in first person)

Wolfe chose an omnipotent narrator, in that case you can either leave the narrator completely bland, or you have it reflect the personalities of the characters who's POV you're currently representing. In a multifacet book like this you normally go after #2. What did Wolfe do? a mix of both. The narrator never completely reflected the types of thoughts that would mirror the current character (you would be hard pressed to make me believe that any basketball star would spend THAT amount of time thinking about the slave / master symbology of their lives...) but it also never faded into the background. It was RIDICULOUS to the point of being painful.

Characters

This might be because the characters themselves were so painfully lacking in definition. Wolfe sets this book up like he's going to look at archetypes - right? So at first you're willing to give him some slack to set up these absolutely obviously awful caricatures of people. The dumb jock, the dweeb, the frat boy, the prissy girl, the sorority girl, etc. But then they don't come out...right. And not in a "oh they turn out to be more dimensional" way, but in a "they turn out to be a mishmash of his own thoughts apparently" way. I think this has a lot to do with the bleed-over narrator. He gives Adam-esque thoughts to Jojo and Charlotte-esque thoughts to Hoyt. So it just doesn't work.

Sexism / Racism / Homophobia and other ills

This was the most painful of all. You get the sense the author is none of the above, but is so intent on proving that, that it doesn't work? You know? The whole thing with Charlotte LITERALLY LOSING HER MIND over a boy. Come on. I know girls can get a little cray cray but that was over the top. And the actual narrator quotes of how she responded so positively "the way girls do" to Adam asserting himself aggressively. What the ... is that?

All the white vs. black player stuff, and the gay rights stuff, all missed the mark. Just poorly done.

The End

Probably the only interesting part of the whole book is the end when Charlotte questions herself on whether she ever wanted a "life of the mind" or just to be recognized, at any cost, and where her intelligence got her recognized at home, that wasn't it at Dupont so she went another way. THAT was an interesting thought. Start there, with the almost double cross from the main character and move backwards rewriting the WHOLE thing. It's almost like the plot points could still work, with a little toning down in places, but just needs to be rewritten by a more skilled author.

I know that's a hard line to take on someone so beloved but this was my honest opinion that I had before I realized (over the course of reading and hearing from other people commenting on what I was reading) that he was loved at all. If there's another book I should try instead I'm open to hearing it, but for now, I'm a big fat no to this book and this author.

This book is...horrible. Something about this novel bothered me the entire time I was reading it. Actually, a lot of somethings bothered me. For one, Wolfe's extreme stereotypical carictures of the characters in this novel are all abrasive and very unrealistic. Secondly, the book is entirely too long--he could have easily cut out at least 200 pages. The excessive length of the book has much to do with the fact that each character makes numerous unncessary very repetitive tirades of their thoughts. After a while I began to try to skim--or even partly skip over some of these such literary occurences, in the novel, because they did nothing but slow the story down. Most importantly, I did not feel any sort of attachement to any character in this novel, furthermore they did more of a job annoying me and repulsing me than anything else.

Much of Wolfe's writing in this novel sounds more like someone from the oustide of college life looking in and satirically commenting about all the terrible horrible, immoral things that happen. Wolfe's potrayal of college life is far--very far---off base. He has no idea what he is talking about. I became especially annoyed at Wolfe's attempt to make a mockery of rap music throughout the novel. Wolfe has obviously barely ever listened to rap music and cannot even begin to fathom the diversity, cultural relevance and depth of thought that much of hip-hop music is about.

The characters in this book are all very simplistic--in the fact that they have no depth whatsoever. I am an avid reader, and one of the great things about fiction novels is the ability of the author to be able to actually make you feel what the characters feel--to experience their emotions. This book did not do that. In fact, I was mostly annoyed by each and every character, and I did not feel for them at all. They were not layered, they did not seem all that human at all. Rather than being believable, I saw them more as puppets that Wolfe manipulated in a way that he saw fit to portray. Racism, sexism, classism and the like run rapid in between and all around every line of this book--and not in a good way.

There is more to college than athletes, fraternities, academics and drug, sex and alcohol. It is true that these things do exist, but certainly not in the way that Wolfe portrays them. There is more to athletes than just sports. There is more to fraternities and the guys who are in them than just sex, parties, drugs and alcohol. There is more to academics than just the extreme outcast geniuses. AND there is more to those geniuses than academics. In simpler terms, Wolfe fails to portray the complexities of college life. The ability for students to exist in between the stereotypes and oustide of them as well.

What is probably the worst part of the novel is the main character, Charlotte Simmons. She is entirely too pure and innocent to be believable. She puts herself on a pedestal and instead of feeling compelled by it and her ability to look at herself in such a positive matter is more so annoying and off putting because she places herself above EVERYONE else in the novel and above every bad thing she happens to encounter. No one is too good for EVERYONE. She thinks herself to good to experience the realities of life.

Wolfe breaks no barriers here, or makes no achievments--he may in fact have set us back thirty or forty years in writing this novel and releasing it to the public. I surely hope that there are not too many people who take his potrayal of college life--and the students a part of it--as true to life.

No one does cliche and predictable like Tom Wolfe and makes it work. I have never read an author more sure of himself and his mission.