While people love to note that it's creepy that Wolfe was an 80+ year old man writing about 18 to 22 year old kids when this book was released, I think he did a brilliant job of depicting college life in the early 2000s--though reading it now it feels decidedly like historical fiction because so much has changed with political correctness and technology. I've always been a sucker for huge sprawling 500+ page novels...The Fortress of Solitude, Middlemarch, Middlesex. I think the length allows the author to really delve into the psyche of the characters; Charlotte's disappointment that an Ivy League school has students that are no less shallow than the kids she left behind in Appalachia, or the spoiled Hoyt who rules the fraternities and treats women like garbage, without really considering his future. I couldn't put it down.

The coolest, most honest work of fiction on college ever written

I Am Charlotte Simmons was published in 2004, which was the year in which I matriculated at my alma mater. I guess that makes Charlotte and I the same age (except that Charlotte is, obviously, a shadowy, fictional stereotype of someone my age and, thus, not real). Charlotte Simmons is a sheltered, smart girl from a small town in the mountains of North Carolina, who ends up at a top university and is shocked by what she sees there. I was also a sheltered smart girl from a small town in the mountains (of Southern California. In case you were unaware, California is also overrun with idiotic Republican whack job Jesus freaks, at least once you get away from the coast and into the shit-hole provincial towns. They're probably spouting nonsense about the glories of gun-ownership via semi-literate Facebook posts as we speak).

All this is to say that Charlotte and I are both girls from small towns who got into prestigious universities, only to find that they didn't fit the Elysian vision of intellectual nirvana we had created for ourselves when we imagined what college would be like. The main difference between us is that, while I was disappointed, I didn't find this particularly surprising.

But wait, you may say, it's unfair for you, as a reader, to hate on a book because it doesn't mirror your own experiences! And this is true, to a point, except that Wolfe wrote a book rife with inaccuracies about what life was like for college students in 2004. This paragraph serves as a running inventory of specific things Tom Wolfe got wrong: Charlotte's roommate brings a fax machine with her, and sets it up in her dorm room (??). Wolfe describes cell phones as if they're super fancy gadgets possessed only by the elite. A fraternity brother asks to borrow porn videos from the other brothers, instead of searching for porn on the internet like a normal human being. Wolfe forgets that we're a bit too young for Animal House and Swingers to be the defining films our youth (although he is correct in assuming that we all watched Old School). I'm pretty sure we're not the first generation to forgo last names when introducing ourselves. Rap and reggae were not the only genres people listened to (I mean, isn't Belle and Sebastain one of the prototypical college bands? Also, reggae has always been pretty niche). Britney Spears peaked when Oops…I did it Again came out in 2000. The Stairmaster may have been big in 80's, but young women have been partial to the elliptical since at least the early 2000's. No cool girl would willingly call herself a "douche" (or a trekkie, for that matter).

To be fair, Wolfe got a few things right. Often, my classmates would proffer answers in class that were so idiotic, I couldn't help but wonder how they had gotten into the university in the first place. Athletes really are treated like gods, even at schools with fairly middling athletic programs. Also, we played a ton of drinking games.

Nevertheless, the millennial cultural narrative doesn't align with Wolfe's story of an edenic fall into a tawdry, quasi-intellectual underbelly populated by hormone-crazed sex drones. In reality, we went to college, like our parents before us, we studied, we graduated, we attempted to obtain gainful employment. Things would be a lot easier if previous generations hadn't managed to screw up both the economy and the environment, but that's a different story. With Charlotte Simmons, it seems to me that Tom is not so much a prescient social commentator as he is a self-indulgent writer who cried wolf.

The main problem with I Am Charlotte Simmons is that that Wolfe fails to satirize the (very real) issues of entitlement and lack of racial and economic diversity on prestigious college campuses. Instead, he adds his voice to the cyclical, and ultimately untenable, diatribe against "kids these days," forgetting that we've been there before, and the overhyped prognostications about the end of polite society have consistently proved to be, shockingly, anticlimactic.

Two stars: one, because the writing is remarkable (this is Tom Wolfe, after all. Dude knows how to write). Two, because there's a great description of the horror that is the fast-casual dining experience.

From my Commentary review - Tom Wolfe, the Mrs Humphry Ward of our Time.

In his long career, Tom Wolfe has written more pages in order to épater les bien-pensants than any writer now alive. He must be surprised, then, that his latest novel-of-the-decade, I Am Charlotte Simmons—genial, trustful, sympathetic—has already created as much ill will as his earlier waspish commentaries on fashionable politics, art, and social pretension. But so it has. Though I Am Charlotte Simmons is not without its defenders, its detractors have been numerous and petulant.

More than any writer of our time, Wolfe has also created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed, for which he is again being punished. Thus, the chief gripe of those who dislike I Am Charlotte Simmons is that it is not sufficiently “Wolfean.” Michiko Kakutani’s reaction in the New York Times was typical. She had expected, she wrote, a grand Tom Wolfe panorama of “big-city racial politics, big-business financial shenanigans, or big-time criminal justice.” Instead, she continued in high sarcasm, Wolfe has taken on “the momentous subject of college life (college life? Yes, college life!), and . . . serves up the revelation—yikes!—that students crave sex and beer, love to party, wear casual clothes, and use four-letter words.”

For others, the very familiarity of Wolfe’s subject matter breeds contempt. “I have never been a Wall Street banker or an Atlanta real-estate developer,” wrote Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun, “so I must take the accuracy of Mr. Wolfe’s earlier novels on trust. But I have been a college student, . . . and I can say with assurance that nothing about Dupont [University] rings true.”

But this is to miss the point. The Dupont of I Am Charlotte Simmons is meant to be exceptional, not necessarily true. It is as heightened a version of college reality as were Wolfe’s earlier portraits of the extravagances of big business, big-city racial politics, and the rest. The question is whether and to what extent this newest portrait succeeds in enabling a Wolfean panorama in full.

The novel’s eponymous hero is a wholly admirable girl from a poor family in a small mountain town in North Carolina called Sparta. Charlotte is ingenuous, but no mere ingénue—nature gave her a perfect SAT score of 1600, and she has been nurtured by the demanding, supportive love of a strong mother, a silent father, and an inspiring teacher. Charlotte leaves Sparta without a single decent pair of jeans but armed with this intellectual and moral inheritance and with a sense that she will return either with her shield of Athena or on it.

The Dupont University at which she arrives has been clearly modeled on Duke—though removed to the countryside of Pennsylvania, which gives the book an oddly O’Hara-esque note. (The novel is chock-full of allusions to stories about the entry of the young into the adult world—Balzac’s Rubempre novels, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Michael Arlen’s 1924 The Green Hat, and others.) Dupont is like Duke both in its academic selectivity and in the character of its students—intelligent and ambitious but not intellectual, and by tradition highly “social.” Most of all, Dupont is like Duke in its grafting of a Division I basketball program onto a superior academic curriculum.

Through Charlotte’s innocent and mascara-less eyes, we encounter three separate student worlds at Dupont, each of which conceives of itself in aristocratic terms. There is the world of Nationally Ranked College Basketball as personified by Jojo Johanssen, Dupont’s only white starting player. There is the world of high society and romance, in the persons of the members of the Saint Ray fraternity and their sorority girlfriends. Finally there are the Millennial Mutants, who represent dorkdom, left-wing political sophistication, and intellectual drive.

The novel’s plot unfolds through Charlotte’s search for a boyfriend within these three worlds and through the complex relationships among the three candidates for that honor: Jojo the basketball player, Hoyt Thorpe the gorgeous fraternity boy, and Adam Gellin the Jewish intellectual. Adam, as a tutor to the basketball team, breaks the academic rules by writing a paper from scratch for Jojo. As a student journalist, Adam also affects Hoyt’s fate when he uncovers a political scandal: the previous spring, Hoyt had stumbled upon the governor of California being fellated by a Dupont coed—and had beaten up the governor’s bodyguard.

A weakling and a virgin, Adam nevertheless has the power to shape the destiny of the two physically stronger boys. Jojo’s future career in the NBA depends on Adam’s ability to evade a charge of plagiarism leveled by a “tenured radical” professor who has it in for Dupont’s pampered basketball players. Hoyt’s future career as an investment banker depends on keeping quiet the story of the governor and the coed—which Adam, wanting desperately to make his mark as a “public intellectual,” has no interest in doing.

All three boys vie for Charlotte’s mind, her body, and her soul. It is Charlotte who inspires Jojo to take his college courses seriously (which nearly leads him to disaster). Charlotte also becomes the inadvertent beneficiary of the chivalry of Hoyt Thorpe in a parking-lot brawl; later he invites her, wardrobe-deprived though she is, to an overnight “formal” in Washington where she is introduced to vodka and sexual intercourse. Adam, in love with Charlotte, explains to her that there are ideas so powerful that they create reality. “The important thing,” he instructs her, “is to be an aristo-meritocrat and live at that higher level.”



Wolfe’s campus, in short, is a place where minds—the minds of the Millennial Mutants, or the mind of Socrates, whose ideas are so painfully acquired by Jojo—meet bodies, not only the incredibly ripped bodies of the major-sport athletes but the well-tuned bodies of the white boys who merely play lacrosse and indeed of most of the students we encounter at Dupont, male and female alike. Minds and bodies—another way of saying that what separates this novel most decisively from its predecessors is not its subject matter but its reach.

Wolfe’s earlier novels were about human passions and frailties, illuminated against a sharply observed social background. I Am Charlotte Simmons is different. It is a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel. And that is why it has been set in the world of the university. The splendors and miseries of undergraduate life fascinate Wolfe not because, as the critic Elaine Showalter surmised, he is an aging and envious voyeur, “titillated by the sexual revolution that has arrived on campus since his own student days,” but because he regards the college campus as a vale of soul-making.

In Wolfe’s imagination, the campus has clearly supplanted the big city as the place where the American character is created and represented. It is the place where people can still try on new personas, experiment without risk (or so they think), and remake themselves on a scale no longer attainable in the great cities. And it is the place where America is most American—where different social classes, sexualities, and ideals jostle, mix, enter into dramatic conflict, and sometimes achieve resolution. The novel’s earnestness and high seriousness about these matters are what make it more interesting, if sometimes less amusing, than The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), and infinitely gayer and more vivid than A Man in Full (1998).

In keeping with the mind-body theme, the presiding spirit in Charlotte is the new science of neurobiology, with which Wolfe is fascinated but whose most extreme claims he instinctively resists. In a course on introductory neurobiology that Charlotte attends—the subject is the material or genetic control of human life, the “whimsicality” of such notions as free will, the self, individuality—Dupont’s Nobel laureate quotes a “very interesting young neuroscientist” as follows:

Let’s say you pick up a rock and you throw it. And in mid-flight you give that rock consciousness and a rational mind. The little rock will think it has free will and will give you a highly rational account of why it has decided to take the route it’s taking.

Just so, the professor instructs his charges, you, the members of this class and this generation, will one day “be able to decide for yourself: ‘Am I really . . . merely . . . a conscious little rock?’ ”

It is in opposition to this chilling little parable that the phrase “I am Charlotte Simmons” presents itself to Charlotte. By excelling in class, she believes she has in fact discovered “the life of the mind” and her own best self. As with her virtue, she will, in the course of this book, lose her grip on the life of the mind and repeatedly find it again. The boys—not only the fraternity brothers and the basketball players (with the exception of Jojo) but also Adam with his disfigured notion of the uses of mind—are not so fortunate.

_____________



Wolfe is concerned with these young people as individuals, but also as the foci of social, biological, and psychological forces. His young men and women arrive at Dupont “determined” not only by their parents’ social rank and success but also by their moral inheritance. Jojo is nearly seven feet tall, but his prowess as a white basketball player was fostered by his father, who insisted on dropping off his twelve-year-old son at the basketball courts of inner-city Trenton. Both Adam and his opposite, Hoyt, are shaped by the weakness and phoniness of their respective fathers (and the indulgence of Adam’s mother). Behind Charlotte is “Momma”—her seriousness, her recognition that her daughter is destined for a greater world than Sparta, her uncompromising belief in Charlotte’s intelligence, together with her demand for obedience and self-discipline. (Curiously absent is any lasting impact from Momma’s “fervent” Christianity, which does not appear to impinge on or figure in Charlotte’s life—perhaps because it does not interest Wolfe.)

But for all its stress on determining factors, I Am Charlotte Simmons is full of idealism—the philosophic kind. In his or her own way, each of the characters discovers that, for better or worse, ideas really do move the world. Their epiphanies include Jojo’s intellectual awakening to the Greek philosophers, Adam’s acknowledgment of his desire to be the kind of intellectual who can “do a country’s thinking for it,” Hoyt’s recognition that his father has not, after all, taught him the infallible secret of how to manipulate others, and, most of all, Charlotte’s effort to maintain her sense of control over her own life and fate. Struggling to be Charlotte Simmons rather than a pathetically self-deluding rock, she is Tom Wolfe’s equivalent of the earnest young clergymen in the novels of George Eliot or Mrs. Humphry Ward, striving to maintain their religious faith in the face of Lyell’s Geology and the Higher Criticism.

Admittedly, Charlotte’s belief in mind and will over matter is sometimes revealed to be an illusion—as when she is being seduced by the heartless aristocrat of Saint Ray:

She wanted to please him, to . . . have him eager for her, like an animal. That was what made her . . . thrill inside. He was a beautiful animal at the peak of his rude animal health. And yet she could always control him. . . . To see his love and his lust and his very mind, for that matter, turned white-hot and forged into a single super-concentrated alloy—whose shape she would determine—that was all she wanted!

This particular attempt of Charlotte’s to deploy idealism in the real world ends badly. But others do not. I hope I will not spoil things if I suggest that at the end of the novel she finds herself in precisely the same position as the Soul-Charioteer whose passionate quest for the beauty that is truth can be read about in Plato’s Phaedrus. I Am Charlotte Simmons is sometimes embarrassing, sometimes painful to read, sometimes thrilling, always full of energy. It is above all a deeply interesting attempt to make the novel, once again, into something more significant than personal testimony—or than “Wolfean” reportage, however vivid.

I really enjoyed reading this book! It gave me so much to think about as I read through in terms of how we think about education, race, socio-economic status, gender, relationships, and popularity! Throughout the book I wished I was in a literature course where we could discuss. It adds a whole extra layer to the context to know that Tom Wolfe was a journalist and was in his eighties when he wrote it. I honestly can’t believe I have never read Wolfe before! Looking forward to reading more in the future!

A femininomenon

Broadly intelligent, but narrowly upsetting

Wolfe could not seem to decide whether he wanted Charlotte Simmons to be a satire or a legitimate zeitgeist piece. Thus, the characters come off as caricatures to ill effect. Wolfe should take a page from Sinclair Lewis, who somehow managed to write biting satire with still-believable protagonists at the helm. Wolfe could have also gone all out and just made this an absurd piece of literature, but he clearly intended to use this book as a revelation on modern college life.

In Wolfe's defense:
Though I think there are legitimate criticisms of Charlotte Simmons, the most frequent one, the "look at how this prude old guy is so freaked out by young people today" criticism is problematic on several levels. First: it is possible for an author to create an authentic protagonist with whom s/he has little in common. Take Mark Twain's feat of writing from the perspective of a boy in Huck Finn or Sinclair Lewis's believable boob Babbitt in the eponymous book. Wolfe may come from a different generation than his characters, but this does not preclude him from channeling universal emotions through his characters, emotions like self-doubt, alienation, etc.

A favorable reviewer on Amazon rightly pointed out that those who criticize Wolfe for not getting this current generation are missing the point. Wolfe is asking the reader to step outside the decadent conventions of this group in order to question why it they are so blindly accepted. To dismiss him because he seems so shocked! by the generation he portrays is to buy into the legitimacy of this (my) generation's norms.

Like so many American novels before it, I Am Charlotte Simmons indicts complacent conformity. Perhaps it's easier to recognize these themes in novels where the author is skewering the prudish, straight-laced yesmen rather than the indulgent, counter-traditional ones, but both societies signify rigidity and intolerance towards deviating norms. The pendulum has just shifted in the sense that polite conversation is now quite hospitable to the impolite, but now the diplomat is the odd man out. Being different is hard, whether you're a wandering musician in 1950s America or an intellecutally curious girl from a quiet mountain town in millenial America.

My biggest issue: I am most disappointed with how unedited I Am Charlotte Simmons seems at times. Wolfe could have pared this book down a lot. He simply writes too much, sometimes mercilessly belaboring his point. Still, I think the generic criticisms of this book are ignorant of a novel's purpose.

I like this book, though it's really looooong.

Some paragraphs go on for a page or two. But once you get into it, the sentences flow and take you to unexpected nuggets of satiric humor and ironic wit. Of course, the dialogue and characterizations are hilarious too.

I would not say that one "loves" or "likes" either Charlotte Simmons or the rest of the characters---which are not prerequisites for the overall quality of a novel---but they ring true. As their psycholoy is revealed, their personalities and choices become patently plausible, invevitable really.

I'm not sure I "liked" the ending, but again, liking it is neither here nor there in terms of quality. I liked it because it seemed a bit idealized and in someways fulfilling, which is also the reason I didn't like it because thus far, the novel had seemed to follow an inevitable and necessary trajectory so that this "happy ending" of sorts, seems a bit out of place.

However, within this ideal situation that the protagonist finds herself in toward the end, reasons for her ultimate choice are hinted at that she herself is barely aware of, and because of this, who she is, what she learns and all that jazz, says a lot about her that clearly demote her from heroine to basically a person one may not like. She has not learned all that much in fact. She is the social animal that is motivated and affected by societal values; she is not above status as defined by not only peers but also by the larger American culture.

I wanted Charlotte to "do the right thing," I really did. But given her experiences, the ending makes sense and the ambiguity about who she is and what she's becoming, are really apt, I think.

I liked this book for the wry comic turns, the wording and syntax are "ambrosial" (a term used by a character) and the intellect is constantly stimulated. As far as the characters and their ultimate development, it's depressing. And not only because they in effect are "evil" or anything like that, but because they mirror back a litttle (or a lot) of ourselves, especially for those who have travailed the path to Higher Ed. The depression hits because the choices made are done by people like you or I, and their all too human desires, ambitions, and psychology make it hard to judge.

You want to identify with a character who is basically good and incapable of corruption because then you can tell yourself you identify with that character. But there are none---Charlotte hardly qualifies as a classic heroine and much less the supporting characters.

This is definitely a Naturalistic novel with all of its social animals trapped by forces out of their control. They are all too human and what the novel has to say about our present culture resonates long after you put it down. While reading it, though, the humor and irony and syntactical brilliance are at the fore.

Small town naive girl goes to college and sleeps with a frat douche...I'm pretty sure there are about 37 Lifetime movies with the same plot. I'm also not sure if I'm supposed to feel sorry for her or laugh at her? That entire premise is so obvious and cliche. She smugly thinks she's so special and better than all the other people at that school but she's so insecure and pretty judgy for someone who has no friends. When Charlotte sticks to her convictions she's grating and annoying and when she throws caution to the wind she's dumb about it. She also essentially treats the one person who is nice to her no better than the fratty treats her (and he tells everybody every single detail of their night, which is super jacked up and just like a fratty would do) but then she gets validated by not exactly growing as a person but maybe just taking on a different persona, since she was so desperate to shed the small town girl image and then the dumb girl who sleeps with the frat guy image.

All the college athletic talk is actually super on point. I worked in college athletics and those students get treated as gods and this was at a pretty middle of the road Mountain West school. I can't even imagine what its like at school where they actually win championships. I mean I can, but still. Tom Wolfe does an okay job of capturing student life in a broad way. The language is a little forced and he relies on terms I expect are regional (all that sarc 1, sarc 2 nonsense, I don't know anyone who actually talks like that, but whatever) but you can tell he did a lot of research to capture some essence of a coed campus situation.

I am Charlotte Simmons is easily 300-400 pages too long especially when you know where it's going.
My new rule is nothing over 400 pages, if you can't land that plane in 400 pages than forget it.
I wish good reads allowed half stars because this is a 2.5er but benefit of the doubt I guess.

In my original review written in 2011, I described it as "Overwritten, but enjoyable in a nostalgic sort of way." Now, having many years to dwell upon it, I have to say that I really enjoyed it more than I was aware of at the time. It has stayed with me. Too many reviewers will denigrate it as not Wolfes' finest. But I loved it. It's wonderful fun.

‘I am Charlotte Simmons’ by Tom Wolfe is a good read, imho. I am aware many Goodreads members do not in the least agree with me. One of the comments most used in these one-star reviews in a variety of ways is:

this is a novel written by a grandpa about “kids these days”.

I noticed most of the GR reviews which use this phrase in their reviews are millennials.

The millennial generation of college graduates is the subject of this lengthy expose disguised as a novel. Wolfe haunted some college campuses for some years observing the millennial generation that attended elite colleges specifically.

Based on my observations of GR reviews written by millennials, they don’t like Wolfe’s observations of them. They are screaming out rebuttals like stuck pigs. Self-defensive much? Touchy touchy…

But most of them do not deny the truths in ‘I am Charlotte Simmons’. Instead they are mostly attacking “grandpa” Wolfe as “not getting it”. They detect a moral tone of disapproval. I did not. I thought Wolfe simply told it like it was.

I saw one review by a millennial which included a sarcastic rebuke of previous generations, especially of the one to which Wolfe belongs, about having wrecked the environment and being generally technologically stupid and social conservative (or should I just repeat the current shorthand meme/phrase of millennials, “ok boomer”). I think this is an ad hominem attack and unfair to the author. Wolfe has simply written a fictional novel, and unfortunately it is perhaps too much of a boilerplate, about what he observed on elite college campuses at the turn of the 21st century.

I have observed millennials, too. I think Wolfe describes them accurately in this book, but perhaps he relies too much on stereotypical characters to represent the various ‘types’ one meets on every college campus since the late 1960’s. Wolfe combines intense dissection of each major character’s psychological profile while also painting in broad strokes their behaviors. These characters are all terribly insecure. They lean heavily on their social class (or try to hide it) and past friendships. They are desperate to join a social clique where they not only feel protected, but it is one of high standing like a fraternity or sorority or a recognized jock tribe, like a college football or basketball team. The nerds, as always and forever, are looked down upon.

You know, like being in middle school again. Some people grow up and become more confident in their skin, some people “don’t get it” and never change, and others crash and burn thinking they are the one person in history who totaled their life because of a social faux pas.

In my humble opinion, the millennial characters in the novel are acting and feeling exactly like us college-age baby boomers did towards adults in the 1960’s/1970’s. Our catchphrase was “trust no one over 30”. “Ok, boomer” expresses the same sentiment and opinions of young 20-30-year-old baby boomers who said “trust no one over 30” exactly.

I can’t defend grandpa baby boomers, but I can speak to what baby boomers were like when they went to public colleges in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. They were exactly - EXACTLY - like the characters in ‘I am Charlotte Simmons’ and also exactly like some millennials I am observing in real life and in social media.

Those reviewers who are millennials who are hating this book sound like us baby boomers did when we were abusing the Greatest Generation for exactly the same issues. We also screamed abuse at our parents for ruining the environment, for their racism, for their technological stupidity and conservative reactionary politics. We demanded the right to use psychedelic drugs and binge drink and have sex with whomever we desired (“if we are old enough to be drafted and die in Vietnam, we are old enough to [fill in the blank]. The birth control pill had become widely available in the late 1960’s and us female baby boomers were all on it as soon as we could - no parental permission required back in the 1970’s. Planned Parenthood clinics were also widely available everywhere, and used, and there were no politicians who dared close them down because we baby boomers were violent and vocal about our rights to abortion. Oh, and one more thing. We baby boomers used the word "Fuck" in every sentence too. That mostly stopped when baby boomers started having kids and when Ronald Reagan was elected.

Such a shame, millennial GR reviewers, in that you don’t know this historical political and social stuff, apparently. If I were you, instead of screaming abuse at grandpa baby boomers who have failed you, I would be working at not turning into your grandpas like many baby boomers did. FYI, I am horrified at how many baby boomers seem to have lost their memories of what they did when they were in their 20’s. I know for a fact many of my baby-boomer relatives have and are totally lying to their kids and grandkids now about what they did in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The emergency room visits for overdoses, the abortions, the car crashes, the job firings, the binge drinking, the frat boys and the mean girls, etc. - I was there, I saw them do it and live it, but now my peers are swearing it never happened.

Ffs. Time IS a circle. This is a warning and a prediction, millennials. If global warming and environmental poisoning doesn’t kill off your kids so that there is a future generation. Get off of YOUR butts and be the change.

Recommended reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter...
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Medium is the Massage
https://www.ushistory.org/us/57h.asp

This was a great read. Tom Wolfe does an excellent job reporting on college life; you'd almost swear it was written by a contemporary. This book tells the story of a sheltered, back-country girl as she adjusts to college life and confronts the world of wealth and entitlement in her prep-school bred fellow students, the frat scene, the jock scene, academic achievements and struggles, and pains of growing up.

Wolfe's writing style is very powerful. I really felt for Charlotte during all her trying and triumphant moments. There's a host of other characters that Charlotte meets who are equally well drawn. If you're drawn to books for good descriptions and sympathetic characters, you'll really enjoy this.

But at times, I found Wolfe's writing to be too self-congratulating. The first time he described the variety of ways people curse today, I thought his moniker of "f*ck patois" was clever. But by the 17th time he used that phrase I was tired of it. And I wasn't sure it needed the 4 page explanation of what that means. So, anyone our age might feel like some obvious things are explained too much (as in "today they use hot for what we used to say was cool") that just makes me picture an out-of-touch 70 year old thinking he's got "us kids" figured out in a way that is clear he doesnt. And speaking of the fact that he was 70 something when he wrote this, some of his descriptions of certain sexual situations is just plain creepy. Apparantly he spent years "researching" at universities across the country, including Duke, where his daughter went to school and which the fictional Dupont University is supposedly based on.

But all in all a good read. If anyone else has read/reads this, let me know - I wanna discuss the ending with someone.