Lot of people hating on this book. zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. It was entertaining, made me laugh. It's fiction, not a treatise. 700+ pages flew by. Stereotypes are funny for a reason. It's because they are, somewhere deep down, based on a truth. The truth sucks, but you can't get sand in your crotch just because he suggests D-1 athletes are meatheads or sorority girls like to get drunk and tear each other down.

This book had its moments, but mostly it was boring, indulgent, and generally unlikeable. I was especially disappointed because I consider Bonfire of the Vanities kind of a classic, but it's clear that Wolfe has either run out of gas or picked the wrong subject matter for this novel.

I skimmed a lot of this because Wolfe wastes so much time riffing...the streams of commentary on college life and coursework, many of which hold no value for the plot, would be forgivable if they were funny or uniquely insightful, but they just come off as though Wolfe is taking the opportunity to hold forth just because he can.

The biggest problem though, was the characters. First, they are all, every one of them, stereotypes. They're too extreme, and therefore not at all believable. Not a one if them reminds me of anyone you'd actually meet in college, except maybe some of the very minor players like Bettina and Mimi.

Of the central characters, only Jojo is at all likeable in the end. As a reader you want to like Charlotte, but she's so incredibly clueless and self-pitying that she just becomes a drag. And for all her righteousness about being victimized by snobs, she herself is just as snobby as the students she looks down on, but she fails to realize this because hers is a different breed of superiority.

College coming-of-age is such an easy subject to write an entertaining-even if not original-story about...which only makes the whole effort feel that much more disappointing.

This is a hard book to rate. The story is full of university hedonism and fowl language. It’s incredibly sad to watch Charlotte make the mistakes she makes and you want someone to rise up to protect her, but all the boys in her life just want to bed her, all the girls to mock her. She is too ashamed to speak to her mentors and when she finally tries to, she veils it all in lies and is rebuked for it. I was entirely invested in Charlottes life and I wanted everything to work out well for her. The ending was kind of disappointing, in my opinion. Everyone’s story is wrapped up, but Charlotte ends in a sort of materialistic nihilism.

The point of the book was really to display the college lifestyle of the early 2000s and to provide a novel that exemplified his essay “Hooking Up”. For this he did excellently. Wolfe had interviewed students across several colleges and even observed frat parties to research for this book. His digressions to explain the college f*** and s*** dialects were quite amusing. This book was written with such a savage satirical bite towards college hedonism it was incredible. All the boys were disgusting slobs and the girls flagrant sluts. The sexual discussions in this story were written with rather medical descriptions, making those scenes feel very cold and unemotional and the interjecting “RUT RUT RUT RUT” which would have the result of alternating between cold clinical aloofness and base animalistic behavior. The boys viewed women as “cum dumpsters” which was a great way of showing the elevation of women after a 100 years of feminism. The women desired the status of men and the status that being “their gf” provided them. The women spent the whole story in vicious class warfare and judging one another based on who the man was that was sleeping with them.

Father hunger was a prevalent theme in this book. Just about every character had issues with their father. Charlotte had the best relationship of all of them and even her father maintained an emotional distance, falsely thinking that was masculine. A striking example is when they see Charlotte of the college and Charlotte throws her arms around her Dad and says: “I love you daddy.”
“We love you too, Charlotte.”
‘He had no idea how much it would’ve meant to her if he’d said ‘I’’

Charlotte suffers from loneliness severely in the story. It causes her to do poorly in school and to lower her morals just to stay with a guy that was playing with her. Because it gave her a sense of community. We need people, a group to be a part of. We can’t do life on our own. In considering this I realized how important it was for the church to have a prominent presence on college campuses if just to provide a community for those who don’t want to be in the hedonistic communities. Charlotte found a sense of belonging in the progressive community, and it wouldn’t shock me if this were a common thing.

Overall, there’s a lot of great stuff Wolfe has incorporated into this story. He is a terrific writer. There were several times that I marveled at how he chose to describe something and how he’s able to switch between perspectives. This is a hard book to read though. Lots of much to wade through.

Not bad but Tom Wolf is a bit too descriptive wheather he's talking about a college basketball games, frat praties, being locked out of your dorm becasue your roomate is fucking, we get it Tom Wolf college is about NCAA bids and parties, and not about the humanities, college is for privileged upper middle class young adults and high school athletes, a place they can put off growing up for four years. This is more or less true about college, unless you attend a liberal arts college which is a huge waste of money and even time, because the library is free and you can study anything there, and become an expert on it, why waste your money it's not as if your going to find a job with a liberal arts degree that affords you to pay your student loan debt back and not live at your parents or live like your homeless. Listen just drop out, college is the biggest scam ever conceived, I wish I never would of attended college.

I picked this up at the big garage sale that my work puts on. It caught my eye and I remember being interested in it after reading a review of it when it came out. It's a pretty thick book, over 750 pages, and I didn't plan on reading it for a while. I read the first few chapters when I got home and got very caught up in it. It is one of those books where once you've start reading it, everything else in your life takes a back seat and you can't do anything else but read the book until you're done. Apparently all of Tom Wolfe's books are like that, though I've only read this one. I'll let the New York Times say it better than I can: "Like everything Wolfe writes, 'I Am Charlotte Simmons' grabs your interest at the outset and saps the desire to do anything else until you finish."

The book is basically a critique of the current state of higher education and the university lifestyle. The three main characters are students at a Dupont, a fictional prestigious liberal arts school on the east coast and their lives intersect through various plot threads. The title character, Charlotte, is the fish out of water from a small working-class town in West Virginia. She comes to Dupont full of innocence and ideals and the book is propelled by the story of her inevitable fall from grace and eventual redemption. There is one long extended chapter the book about Charlotte going to the big fraternity formal with her new boyfriend and his friends. Wolfe describes what is happening in real time with great detail (both material and emotional), and the result is an incredible and extremely moving piece of writing. If movies that present prom night as an magical evening where everyone's problems are somehow resolved are a zero on the realism scale, Wolfe's description of Charlotte's experience is an easy 10 .

One of the things that Wolfe does really well is observe the motivations behind people's words and actions, analyzing people in much the same way that a biologist would study the behavior of animals. To Tom Wolfe, every human interaction is a struggle for dominance, and he makes his case convincingly enough particularly when applied to the seemingly simple but incredibly complex social codes of the fraternities and sororities.

Wolfe does stumble occasionally, getting a bit out of his element, particularly when attempting to recreate the dialogue and slang of the black players on the college basketball team. He creates a rapper called Doctor Dis and writes lyrics for his songs in a few cringe-inducing passages. Still, you've got to give an old white guy credit for an attempt. A large part of Wolfe's critique is about class, and the sense of entitlement that well-heeled and well-educated feel. Wolfe lays it on a little too thick in describing Charlotte's humble background, however, and details like Charlotte's family having to use a picnic table inside because they couldn't afford a dining table seemed forced. One final criticism that I'll make is that I though that the end was too neat and sudden. I expected more of a payoff, though I was satisfied enough (if only just to see Charlotte okay again after everything that Wolfe puts her through).

This book got a lot of mixed reviews, and some critics really panned it, seeing it as a one of Wolfe's lesser books. I'm not familiar with his other works and with nothing else to compare it to, I was blown away and completely engrossed. I'd strongly recommend it, though only if you can afford to disappear for a week.

Non posso dire che mi abbia deluso perchè non ho mai letto niente di questo scrittore e non sapevo cosa aspettarmi. Posso dire che il personaggio di Charlotte mi ha deluso, è una ragazza tipo "voglio ma non posso" e poi .. alla fine il suo "fidanzamento" (non dico altro per non far scoprire la storia) mi ha lasciato veramente male.

This was an interesting look into a fictional prestigious Ivy League College. The main character is a very naive brainy young woman from the Blue Ridge Mountains and her journey through the tenuous freshman year. Snarky, sad and at times frustrating at her total lack of savoir faire, I enjoyed and was very engaged in the story and characters. Tom Wolfe is a master storyteller.

This was far too long. When I am 200 pages into a book, I do not want a 50 page background on a character that probably wont matter anyway. Read The Rules of Attraction or The Sorrows of Young Mike if you want to know about college kids. Tom Wolfe is for people who have a lot of time on their hands.

Dude, didja see her? Bra, check her out! She’s smokin’ hot, man! WAZZZZUPPPP, my bros! As the sounds of inane conversation filter above the bass thumping and pounding, you notice him. He looks, well, old. Arteriosclerotic. A fossil, for sure. Why is he here? He must be a narc. One of the deans, maybe? And what’s he wearing? A suit? Who wears a suit when you’re trying to be a narc? Not only that, it’s a white suit. Didn’t he get the memo, the black light party was LAST weekend. Huh. Definitely some kind of narc. He’s not trying to fit in and dance to the music the way the other narcs do, using dated college slang from the 1980’s. He’s not trying to mack on the hotties, either. He seems impervious to their loamy loins, although he might be too old to notice—he’s not in the season of the rising sap anymore! He’s just standing there, holding a hulking green notebook in his hands, scribbling down something. It’s so dark in here, how can he even see what he’s writing down? Super weird.

In Tom Wolfe’s third novel, 2004’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe presents the reader with a very detailed picture of Charlotte Simmons’ first semester at the fictional Dupont University. Dupont is a well-regarded academic institution that also wins national championships in basketball. Wolfe said of Dupont that it was based on “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, and a few other places all rolled into one.” (Quoted in the Yale Alumni magazine.)

Charlotte Simmons is a brilliant young woman who graduated valedictorian from Sparta High School in Sparta, North Carolina, a small town in the northwest corner of the state. Charlotte has her sights set on getting out of Sparta, and she gets a scholarship to attend Dupont, the college of her dreams.

But Charlotte has a rude awakening in store for her when she gets to Dupont. Charlotte is disappointed to discover that a lot of the focus at Dupont is on frat parties and drinking, and not so much on “the life of the mind,” as she had hoped. Her roommate, Beverly, is a shallow rich girl who is only concerned with Charlotte when she needs the dorm room for a tryst.

I Am Charlotte Simmons also follows “Jojo” Johanssen, the only white starting player on the Dupont basketball team. Through Johanssen’s story arc, Wolfe offers a sharp critique of college athletic programs that treat their players as prized ponies, giving them preferential treatment at every turn, and keeping them isolated from the rest of the undergraduates. Through an encounter with Charlotte, Jojo suddenly, and perhaps somewhat improbably, seeks to take more challenging classes, much to the chagrin of his basketball coach.

Jojo has an academic tutor to help him pass his classes, Adam Gellin. Adam is a smart, hard-working student who also delivers pizzas in his spare time. Adam meets Charlotte, and in addition to being struck by her beauty, he finds someone who is also searching for something more from the college experience than a round of parties.

Another major character is the douchebag frat boy Hoyt Thorpe. Like all the other males in the novel, Hoyt encounters Charlotte and finds her very beautiful. As a senior, Hoyt has anxiety about his future, as his academic transcript is less than stellar.

One of the most outstanding parts of the book is the novella-length section that recounts Charlotte’s overnight trip as Hoyt’s date to his fraternity formal in Washington, DC. The whole trip is a disaster from the beginning, as Charlotte suffers through an awkward car ride with juniors and seniors that she doesn’t know. The other girls mock Charlotte’s Southern accent, and she feels very isolated. When the group checks into the hotel, Charlotte is surprised that she doesn’t have her own hotel room, and instead will have to share a room with Hoyt and another couple. Charlotte gets very drunk during the formal, and as night turns into morning, Hoyt has sex with her. Charlotte is a virgin and bleeds on the bedsheets, disgusting Hoyt. Charlotte is impaired from her drinking, and her consent is hazy at best. Throughout these painful chapters, you’re hoping that somehow Charlotte will extricate herself from this awful situation and that the evening won’t turn out the way you fear it will. When Charlotte returns to campus, the story of her losing her virginity quickly makes the rounds of Dupont, and she finds herself socially ostracized.

Michiko Kakutani called the novel’s sex scenes “gross” and “leering” in her New York Times review, but it’s clear the scene is supposed to be extremely uncomfortable. There’s nothing erotic or sexy about it. When Wolfe was interviewed on NPR about the sex scenes, he said, “I wanted these scenes to be as impersonal as, in fact, they are.”

On a lighter note, there are several in jokes in I Am Charlotte Simmons for Tom Wolfe fans to enjoy. Hoyt Thorpe is pursued by the bond firm Pierce & Pierce, which is the company that Sherman McCoy worked for in The Bonfire of the Vanities. The law firm of Dunning, Sponget, and Leach, first introduced in Bonfire, makes an appearance towards the end of the novel. Streptolon, Wolfe’s favorite fictional synthetic material, first introduced in his writing in the late 1960’s and name-checked in nearly all of his books, appears here as warm-up pants and the webbing for a deck chair. As usual, people are packed “shank to flank,” numerous young women have “loamy loins,” and many young men are going through “the season of the rising sap.” Wolfe also briefly references one of his favorite novels, James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, a masterpiece of the kind of detailed, naturalistic fiction that Wolfe favored.

Wolfe nails the details of his characters, from Charlotte’s occasional upspeak, to Adam’s desire to show off his knowledge, to Jojo’s insecurity when a hotshot African American player threatens his role as a starter. Wolfe was a master of the neuroses of the male psyche, as he saw with sharp clarity how males present themselves in society in order to establish their places in the status hierarchy.

Wolfe gives all his characters vivid, detailed backstories, showing us how they have journeyed to this point in their lives, and how things like class, status, and money have formed them. Wolfe’s attention to details helps him create a vibrant picture of college life at the turn of the millennium.

I Am Charlotte Simmons was savaged by reviewers when it was released in the fall of 2004. Many critics complained about Wolfe trying to create credible characters that were fifty years younger than he was. However, as someone who went to college during the time that Wolfe was writing the novel, I found it to be a very accurate depiction of college life, even though the college I attended was very different from Dupont University. I think it’s a major achievement of Wolfe’s that he was able to create vibrant characters that were fifty years younger than he was. If you want to know what college was like in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, read I Am Charlotte Simmons.

SIX STARS! Recently graduated, I resonated with this novel! Over ten years later, this could not be a more true rendition of how corrupt, backwards, and retroactive the whole construct of "higher" education is, and how far our Education system has fallen.

The critical lens Wolfe holds up to the sadistic, infantile culture at our universities creates a beautiful, moving satire that speaks to the destroyed world we allowed these kids to desecrate.

Here's the thing. I really like Tom Wolfe's books. Right up until his editor calls him and says, "Tom, I gotta have that final draft by the first of the month," and he writes some crap ending that just ruins the whole thing. Same thing with "A Man in Full". Frustrating.

I can't figure out why Tom Wolfe is so revered...maybe because of Bonfire of the Vanities. But this book is a study in poorly developed sensationalism with hyperbole. All the characters are one-dimensional stereotypes, the plot is predictable, and the writing banal. I think people like this book for the same reason they like Joan Collins or US Weekly - we know it is trash and we like trash. Sadly, this is not even good trash. (Bad trash! Bad trash!)


According to this book, students are only able to be one of 5 people: intellectual yet wildly naive misfit who sells her soul to be popular; stupid athlete in a system that supports cheating; slutty overprivileged prep school girl who has no time for studying in between her sexual liasions and alcoholic binges; geeky newspaper nerd with meglomanical delusions; stupid rich frat boy with meglomaniacal delusions and a vocabulary consisting only of 4-letter words. Hmm. Hard to pick as I am so similar to them all.

Full disclosure - I also take some slight personal offense to this book because it is a thinly-veiled representation of my alma mater, and one that perpetuates the media sensationalism around my school that I feel is very misguided. Given that Wolfe's daughter went there as well and apparently read the manuscript, I have to wonder what her father thinks she was doing for 4 years.