this is the worst book i have ever read in my entire life and i am not exaggerating when i say that. the only reason i finished this book is because i needed to write an integrative analysis on it for one of my courses. truly reads like some old dude shaking his fist at "kids these days" in a completely unhinged and out of touch way. complete with rampant sexism and racism, this is 675 pages of pure bullshit. stay away.

On the topic of hoops fiction (w/ Boice), I decided to bust this dust gathering doorstop out of the bookshelf graveyard.
Having read excerpts of this upon publication, I decided to skip two of the three plot lines - those of Charlotte (small-town every girl meets big time state school) and Hoyt (the Reede Seligmann model) for the story of Jojo (white hoops player trying to make good on a squad of aggressive, do-me, Adonis black dudes).
I guess not surprisingly Wolfe succeeds greatly in portraying a top-notch D1 hoops program - and the politics that go with it.
The only trouble I had with the team he imagines is the clear-cut distinction he makes between the white + black players (almost a sharks v jets rivalry) which I never found to be the case.

Tom Wolfe is just so damn entertaining! His books are five-sense experiences with the way he plays with words and punctuation and repetition. My only disappointment was the way Charlotte seemed to have lost her "I am" at the end. She becomes the appendage of another person: "[I won't say who's] girlfriend." Even as we watch a woman vie for US President, perhaps this is the way of the world? This book was published twenty years ago, but not that much has changed.

Let's say 2 1/2 stars. I can't give it fewer than that because the prose is beautiful. However, I humbly think I know a thing or two about college students. I was an undergraduate when Wolfe published this book, and have spent most of the years since then teaching them. Are they naive? Sure. Do they make poor life decisions? Absolutely. But they're not the status-obsessed orgy-goers of this book. At least, most aren't. The book itself seems to have nothing but contempt for its characters, and while some of them (the rape-y frat boy and the entitled, cheating athlete, stereotypes that do represent a reality in some cases) deserve it, most of them, from Charlotte herself to her vapid roommate to her gossipy friends, are poor, shallow caricatures of kids trying to figure out where they fit.

The depiction of depression is also disappointingly facile. And Wolfe is walking a very fine line between representing sexism and racism and actually being sexist and racist. I'm not sure which side of that line he ends up on.

I really appreciated the plotting and how completely Wolfe plunges the reader into the modern university. In fact, it seems like this could easily have been set at UNC-Chapel Hill. That said, he really did spend more time than strictly necessary with his lurid prose about the variegated body types on campus and the frequency with which students thought about sex and acted upon those thoughts. A crazy amount of foul language, as you might expect.

I say all this knowing full well that my objections are probably what makes it such a fully drawn out experience of Charlotte, Adam, JoJo, and Hoyt. So, you know, take it for what it’s worth.

Tom Wolfe undoubtedly did some research and got some things right. His humorously pedantic grammar lesson in adolescent "fuck patois" is impossible not to laugh at, his descriptions of fraternity parties are disgustingly accurate, his portrayal of the athletic monomania of D1 schools utterly on point. He even, once or twice, manages to grasp the mental gymnastics young women are forced to perform when trying to figure out what men want from them, and how they're going to escape unscathed if it tuns out to be something they don't want. Unfortunately, that's the extent of Wolfe's insight. His titular protagonist--the only significant female character in the entire book--is a textbook example of the way men think women think. She's pretty but charmingly unaware of how pretty she is, wants men to want her but not to give them what they want, and is obliged to drop everything and take care of said men when they need her, whether as a girlfriend, mother, tutor, witness, whatever. She's the worst sort of Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a kind of humorless redneck Rory Gilmore, so smart and so pretty and so crucially not like other girls. She's also so naive it borders on imbecilic, and characterized as "virginal"--implicitly and explicitly--with fetishistic perseverance. Despite the fact that she's about as interesting to read as the Yellow Pages, every guy in the book is dying to deflower her, in grossly graphic detail. (In a scene which takes place at the university gym, one of these would-be Lotharios waxes poetic about the line of sweat in her ass crack. I wish I were making that up.) When her virtue is finally besmirched, it sends her into the sort of downward spiral nuns warned me about in Catholic school: she gets drunk and lets a boy take her clothes off and all of a sudden she's sullied, dirty, worthless, unable to even drag herself out of bed until--Surprise!--a man comes to the rescue. (The same man, incidentally, who was so enthralled by the sweating of her posterior. What a prince.) After a truly unbelievable deus ex machina, the book ends on a peculiar note, with Charlotte emerging from her tribulations having completed her devolution from "not like other girls" to exactly like other girls: in other words, a catty vapid bitch. In Wolfe's collegiate world, there are no other options.

I Am Charlotte Simmons is the latest work by Tom Wolfe (Bonfire of the Vanities). Having seen/heard a few favorable reviews (though I don’t remember where), and needing something to listen too during my commute to work, I decided to give this a shot. After all, it was 50 percent off, and over thirty-one hours long! Entertainment for weeks!

Or not.

I Am Charlotte Simmons is the story of a collection of stereotypes. Whoops, excuse me. I mean, it’s the story of Charlotte Simmons, an impossibly naïve genius from Sparta, North Carolina who, by virtue of her amazing intellect, receives a full scholarship to Dupont University (supposedly an analog for Duke or UVa). The other main characters include JoJo Johansen, Dupont’s sole white starting basketball player, Beverly, a Groton produced snob, Adam…Geller, a smart kid, and Hoyt Thorpe, a frat boy. Five complete and total stereotypes without a hint of original thought or action.



It gets worse.



First of all, the title character is so ignorant of the world that it’s actually offensive. I may have siphoned off some of Starla’s sensitivity on this subject, but North Carolina is hardly stuck in the Dark Ages. Yes, there are backwoods places that aren’t up on the latest culture and fashion, but Charlotte Simmons is so ignorant it is quite literally unbelievable. She’s completely shocked (shocked, I tell you!) that there is drinking going on in her dorm. Drinking! It’s unbelievable. How could students be drinking? This is a dry dorm! The RA said there would be no drinking! And yes, the book does go on, and on, and on, in this fashion. Wolfe seems to feel the need to repeat each and every point over and over again. And one more time, in case you missed it.



To make things worse, Wolfe occasionally displays his own total ignorance of the culture he’s writing about. During one of Hoyt Thorpe’s many drunken contemplations (frat boys in the Wolfe-verse never sober up), he starts thinking of various frat type movies like Animal House, Old School, and The Usual Suspects.


The Usual Suspects? It’s a murder mystery, Tom. If you’re going to clumsily assail modern academia (and believe me Tom, there’s plenty to assail), could you at least get your facts right? Or make some sense.

The audio version is read by Dylan Baker (Spider Man 2), who does a decent voice acting job, though all of his college-age men sound precisely the same. He has a tendency to sound whiney a lot, but I think that’s an effect of how whiny this book is, not his acting skills.

As much as part of me wants to, I just couldn’t finish this thing. The book lacks a believable character, plot, or event to draw the reader in. Worse, Wolfe seems intent on showing off his voluminous vocabulary and dragging out each and every moment for as long as possible. I finished about six CD’s, and then gave up.

Sorry Mr. Wolfe – you broke me.

Another great read from Wolfe, one of my favorites. Bought this for $1 at a book sale last week. Wolfe tells the story of a bunch of college students at a prestigious University.

A very flawed, but well written snapshot of elite college life in the early 21st century. The moral decay of our culture is on full display in all of it's ugliness. Wolfe attempts to depict the temptation and rapid fall of a young Christian girl in a classic "fish out of water" tale. The lack of real insight into what it means to be a born again Christian is one major flaw here. Wolfe doesn't convince the reader that his heroine really has a relationship with Christ. Her Christianity is cultural and familial and doesn't stand a chance in the satanic pool she is thrown into. She makes no attempt to seek out fellow believers, but instead flounders about in all the wrong crowds on campus with the all too predictable results. Perhaps this is the author's subtle intent?

Wolfe does a nice job of skewering the insidious slide to Sodom, called Political Correctness, that has since descended into the insanity of "woke."

Charlotte eventually settles into a life of somewhat uncomfortable compromise. Getting to this stasis feels a bit too rushed, but this is a big book and the editors may have stepped in to wrap it up.

I'd gone through some of the reviews here before I picked it up and I thought they were exaggerated. Nope. This really IS an old fella's attempt to explain you your college experience (assuming you went to college in the last decade).
I have 2 major problems with this book. First of them is the author. What is your deal, Tom Wolfe? I've never read any other book written by him (don't think I will) so I can't say if it's his usual style but is he a control freak? Is he bizzarely proud of his research? Or, which might be the most probable answer, does he think his readers are f*cking morons? Or maybe he thought only other 70+ year olds will be the ones reading this novel? Why else would he explain everything? People, we get a definition of humping. We learn that Nietzsche was "a German philosopher". He tells us 3.99 USD is not a price of a year's subscription of Cosmo, it's what you pay for one issue (which is supposed to be a shocker, apparently)! Is he for real?!
Also, the main character. Charlotte Simmons, the sweet virgin. Are we supposed to like her? To root for her? To symphatize with her? Because she's the most annoying, self-righteous uptight b*tch. Plus, I'm not from NC but I'll take a wild guess and assume North Carolina circa 2004 generally had TV and internet, right? So am I really supposed to believe a smart girl who went to a normal public high school would be so utterly shocked by a bit of cursing? By a boy in a corridor wearing (the horror!) a t-shirt and boxer shorts? By people (gasp!) having sex (not in front of her, just in the same building)? Had she never watched the O.C., or anything on MTV? Believe me, I get that wild partying and casual sex are not for everyone, I do. I just don't think her reactions to so.many.things. are the reactions of a young girl (even a small town one, who's introvertic, unexperienced etc.). Really, such people simply don't exist.

Also, Wolfe seems to master the subject yet fails to build a realistic world based on his research. Yes, he knows the lingo (yet he uses it same way a nerdy kid who tries to be cool would). But at the same time he seems not to understand how rapidly some fashions and quirks change - around 2004 no girl would take "You look like Britney Spears" as a compliment anymore, yet this very line is used repeatedly and very succesfully by one of the male characters. Tiny detail? Yes, but social realities of such books are based on them (and there are many other examples).

My advice: if you want a story about college kids doing auto-destructive things, read Easton Ellis. He did it much better. 20 years earlier. And while he was still actually young.


Edit: I've actually finished it (I hate to quit books, even if they suck) - my opinion hasn't changed. One more general thought though - some people defend this book saying the author asks us to question the norms. I think they're giving this novel wayyyy too much credit. As one reviewer on this very website said, Wolfe must have got the norms wrong.

Is this the most innovative, unpredictable novel ever written? Nope, but I can't deny that Wolfe's nasty, satirical pageturner about millennial college life in the US is great fun. Protagonist Charlotte Simmons has grown up in the small town of Sparta, NC, in a conservative working class environment. When she starts college at the prestigious Dupont University, well-known for academic excellence and its successful athletics department (hello, Duke), virginal Charlotte has trouble fitting in with the more worldly rich kids, Greek letter organizations, and jocks. Aspiring to reach a higher position in the on-campus pecking order, she takes some measures that, due to her naivety and the cruelty of the social order, soon get out of control...

Sure, Wolfe employs quite some stereotypes and cliches, but it's not like these don't exist in reality. Everybody in this book is more or less unlikeable, and it speaks volumes that reading the text is still so much fun: Charlotte is lonely and insecure, but she is also arrogant and ignorant - and so are many other characters. While the story is narrated in the third person, we perceive everything from Charlotte's perspective, which means that we witness her reasonings and justifications, and they are psychologically believable and well-rendered. The intricate psychological writing is juxtaposed with many flashy, over-the-top characters who do flashy, over-the-top things (rich kids being the meanest mean girls imaginable, sports stars having sex with groupies and cheating their way through classes, unpopular nerds founding nerd clubs and fantasizing about their future success etc. pp.).

Wolfe's held back, matter-of-fact narration shows how the students at Dupont strife for status, but the author does not judge them - in fact, he does not even present one character that offers appealing alternative ways of behavior. This set-up gives the book its light, satirical flair, and while the novel certainly qualifies as social commentary, it is no "o tempora, o mores" lament. I enjoyed the easy flow, the entertaining story and the many subplots of the text, so while this is no literary masterpiece, it's a good book that tells quite some truths about life in general.

Incidentally, the wonderful Hasan Minhaj has recently produced a great episode of "Patriot Act" entitled "Is College Still Worth It?", pondering some of the trends Wolfe talks about as well (but in the context of the Corona crisis).

I read this because I was curious given the rumors that it was in significant part a reflection of the Duke student experience. The only good thing I can say is that it was a page turner, much like a trashy soap, but I cringed throughout the book. Wolfe’s portrayal of the Black student athletes was racist and his attempts to portray their dialogue was both embarrassing and offensive. He generally described the Black students as one dimensional. Either they were the stereotype of an entitled jock or someone to fear you might offend. Of course he chose to center and feature the experiences of White students. There was one Asian character who was interesting and not based upon a stereotype but we hardly got to learn anything about her. I recognize that this was written in 2004 but ugh.