I was engrossed in this book from its first pages. I read it during the last semester of my 6-year-long midlife return to college, and felt it was right on the money in its depiction of certain segments of college life. My university is a well-known Southern party school, close rival of another well-known Southern party school where Wolfe did a good bit of research--and where similar events are not uncommon. Like I said, right on. Exaggerated of course, and skewered with rapier wit as only Wolfe can. Beautiful, eloquent language. Wolfe has the right stuff, for sure.

Why what is what it does not work. Tom Wolfe, I like. It is the only gonzo journalist who was in more a writer. We can discuss for Truman Capote. He realizes this delicate balance between report and fiction. But why is he led astray in this novel campus. The romance it is not his thing.
The misadventures of this a little bit stupid girl have difficulty in fascinating me. Well It is Tom, we forgive him. An average book of Wolfe will always be better than a good book of the other writers (I shall not quote from name).
On the other hand, the last one on Miami is good.

Any girl who has ever gone through the journey of the small liberal arts big name college will know parts of Charlotte in ways that take them back to times and insecurities that are far better left forgotten. Charlotte, the brain trust of her small town, enters the world of the privledged "it's mine because I'm entitled to it" college student. It should be a coming of age tale, and it is but in the twisted way. Charlotte loses herself and every belief she held to fit in from the first day of her freshman year to the last day of her senior. Her uncooth parents embarass her, and so she pushes them away. She is so insecure that she constantly obsesses about what she wears, what she eats, who she is seen with, how she speaks, and with whom she sleeps. After a few months, it's clear that she has lost her identity entirely. My favorite part about this book is what makes it real - disturbing but true - she doesn't come back around. And I think that's a reality. When we lose ourselves, we don't get that self back, we just create a new one. Maybe that new one mimics many parts of the old self, but the new insecurities prevent it from every returning to the original. If you want a pick me up, this is not the book. However, if you have been in this world and want to appreciate how you made it through and appreciate life on the other side, you won't be disappointed.

Rated R for language and sexuality. And yet, this book is still difficult to evaluate, because authorial tone is a major factor in evaluation. While I don't know Wolfe's work well, it's clear that nothing raunchy in this book is meant to be gloried in. In fact, Wolfe (at least here) seems to be intent on providing something of an exposé—this is what a "progressive" agenda gets you, a cesspool of disgusting, human-degrading behavior that is laughed off or slept away, only to be returned to the next day, like dogs to vomit.

Although there is a sense of justice at the end (unfortunately, Charlotte has no room for forgiveness in her heart), it's clear that Wolfe intends for readers to be saddened (and shocked) by what really goes on in American universities. And Wolfe would know, having done extensive first-hand research on campuses across the nation. In his book How (Not) to Be Secular, Jamie Smith writes (102n15) that Tom Wolfe's novels show what modern "liberation" gets you, and it's not liberty.

The one-star reviews on GoodReads are pretty rabid. They strike me as the futile wails of people who know that they've been nailed to the wall. On its way to that wall, the nail hit a nerve, and people never like their imbecility being pointed out. A common charge is that Wolfe is naively complaining about "kids these days," but it's unclear what the problem is. Is Wolfe's depiction of "kids these days" inaccurate? Is his depiction of "kids these days" accurate, but inconsequential? Some of these reviews sound like a few of the rejects from the book crawled out and wrote their own reviews, demonstrating that those who think that there's nothing wrong with American higher education are themselves their own punishment.

Several quotes/comments here, here, here, and here.

See here (6:33 to 10:04) for N.D. Wilson's comments about books vs. films.

Very good review at The American Conservative.

Wolfe is an atheist, but in The Kingdom of Speech, he mocks Darwinian evolution.

Wolfe died in May 2018.

Je ne sais pas pour quelle raison, mais je suis un grand fan d’un sous-genre littéraire – ce n’est pas péjoratif – relativement confidentiel portant le nom de campus novel et qui désigne – comme son nom l’indique – un roman se déroulant au sein d’une université. Je pense que tout a commencé avec les romans de  David Lodge, la Trilogie de Rummidge, puis avec le livre de  Donna Tartt  Le maître des illusions, s’est poursuivi avec  Le roman du mariage qui n’est pas dans le canon, mais s’en approche. Avec Moi, Charlotte Simmons par contre on est en plein dans l’archétype et c’est le grand  Tom Wolfe qui s’y colle. Le dandy a promené son costume blanc sur les campus – il n’a pas dû passer inaperçu – afin de collecter, comme à son habitude, le matériel nécessaire à l’écriture de son livre.

Comme personnage principal il s’est glissé dans la peau d’une fille, Charlotte qui est l’héroïne de ce roman. Comme dans la grande tradition des romans d’apprentissage, il s’agit d’une fille de la campagne, innocente et prude, qui va se retrouver plongée dans le grand bain. Malgré son talent, puisqu’elle est très douée, et sa détermination hors du commun, ce passage à l’université ne va pas être un parcours de santé. Tom Wolfe est un marionnettiste, en maître du genre il semble prendre un malin plaisir à faire souffrir ses personnages. On dirait qu’il les met à cuire dans un marmite, change la température progressivement, ajoute des épices, les fait cuire tour à tour à feu vif puis à petit feu. Je sais depuis la lecture de son livre Le bûcher des vanités que Tom Wolfe est un adepte du rise and fall théâtral. Alors on pourrait dire que c’est parfois caricatural, bourré de stéréotypes, exagéré, mais ça fait partie du jeu. On pourrait aussi arguer que c’est un peu long, mais ça vaut vraiment le coup car ce livre regorge de moments d’anthologie.

Également publié sur mon blog.

I'm not going to go around recommending this one willy-nilly to church friends looking for just a really good read, as it's pretty raunchy and brimming with bad language. That said, the raunch is in the service of verisimilitude, and the satirical humor is spot on. I was a university student at the same time as the fictional Charlotte Simmons, and while frat boys were soooo not my scene (I was too busy hanging out with my local Salvation Army brass band friends—yeah!) reading this novel brought me right back to those days in the early 2000's. Wolfe clearly did his research; everything down to music and clothing references (Ben Harper and Abercrombie and Fitch!), not to mention his perfect application of the word Okaaaaaay, was brilliant. I was totally engrossed and desperate to see what would become of Charlotte Simmons.

Also, I find it hilarious and kinda ironic that many of the negative reviews characterize Wolfe as some stodgy, back in my day, killjoy of a grandpa. Wolfe is definitely a grampie that I'd want at my party; he's hilarious!

Now for my next Wolfe novel...

I had the book sitting in my towering TBR pile for years, picked it up several times before, and never made it past the first 50 or so pages. I have unfair expectations for Tom Wolfe; I assumed that as with all of his other books "Charlotte" would suck me inside the author's head the moment I started reading. It did not. I finally decided it was time to donate the book or read the darn thing through, and so I soldiered on. Turned out, this is as engrossing a read as Wolfe's other books after the first 100 pages. So...only 2 stars? Well, yes. At the end of the day I was surprised at how little Wolfe understood the people he wrote about or the world they live in. Worse, there was not a single vaguely appealing character to be found. The best that could be said about any is that they were, at times, pathetic. Satire doesn't work without a single relateable character, and as reportage or editorial this simply fails.

I was scanning reviews on another site, and one of the positive reviews started with "you have to love Charlotte." Perhaps that is true, but I can't imagine anyone loving Charlotte in the least. She is an insufferable utterly humorless prig, who clearly believes understanding anything about popular culture is beneath her notice and that made her destruction satisfying. Given the general availability of things like television and the internet in the time covered here (even in the South Mr. Wolfe!) she would need to make a choice to be so utterly naive upon her arrival at college. And even assuming she was raised Amish or in some sort of anti-technology cult (which does not appear to be the case) she should have been able to catch up a bit when she reached civilization. Yet she has no interest in learning or adapting, simply in judging (herself and others) and wondering why everyone else is so awful. When lonliness or awkwardness finally knocks at her door rather than learning (her intellect is purported to be exceptional, and all things can be learned) she chooses magical thinking and abdandonment of self over simple observation and thoughtful modification. In our protaganist I wanted to find Alice, or Gulliver, or Hank Morgan. What I got was an sour combination of Cotton Mather, Gladys Kravitz and Fanny Price. She is not believable, she is not likable, she is not relatable. I suspect she is Tom Wolfe -- I hope not, but if so count him on my list of people with whom I never want to hang out.

Things don't really improve when one moves on from looking at just Charlotte. I am not of the generation portrayed here. I received my undergradute degree in 1984 and completed my graduate work in 1989 so it has been over 20 years since I lived on campus. The endless drinking, the random sex, the confusion between sophistication and ennui, the anti-intellectual zeitgest -- that is EXACTLY what college was like in 1980. Actually, forget 1980 -- it could be 1960. This is like "Animal House," with Doug Niedermeyer in drag front and center. Actually, make that 1950 since I imagine these charcters would work as a prequel to the wonderful "Bonfire of the Vanities". ("Kindling the Bonfire: The College Years!.") Maybe I am lowbrow, but I'll take Blutarsky over Niedermeyer any day. Both are going to hell, but only one is making the trip fun. If Mr. Wolfe was interested in focusing a lens on the milleniul generation, he needed some much fresher research and keener observations.

I don't really know how to wrap this up: I enjoyed reading the book, perhaps in part because I found so much of it objectionable, and in part because dude knows his prose. As social commentary, or allegory though, it failed spectacularly.

The Times of London recently ran a story about a book on 13 unsolved questions of science. For example, the fact that we can only account for four percent of the universe, or that the fundamental constants of physics may have been different in the distant past, judging by the way light travels around the cosmos. One mystery in particular is that of consciousness.

Neuroscientists, for example, say that the entire idea of free will is an illusion - a trick our brains play on us. We are really walking brain machines that obey chemicals and instinctual commands hardwired into us by our Darwinian forebears. Guts - grace under pressure - isn’t so much a sign of character as good body chemistry.

In light of that, it might be time to take another look at a recent novel that was savaged from several different fronts earlier in this decade - Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” Among its dubious honors was taking the Literary Review’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” award, recognizing distinction in the novel for awkwardly or poorly rendered erotic scenes.

I’m not going to tackle Wolfe’s prowess in this regard - his defense was that he was trying to deliberately make the scenes awkward and unappetizing. Judge for yourself. There was also plenty of criticism that Wolfe had either written an entirely unnecessary novel with the revelation - Gasp! - that college kids have wild, unprotected sex, or that the novel reads like a puritanical 70-year-old man trying to describe a world he neither belonged to nor understood.

Judge for yourself. There is a certain artistic hubris apparent in the novel, though you have to admire the guts of a man of Wolfe’s age encountering the milieu he describes. Instead, I think these criticisms ignored the real crux of the novel - free will. Mr. Starling, the professor says it plainly: “If man is an animal, to what extent does his genetic code, unbeknownst to him, control his life?”

Charlotte Simmons is Wolfe’s lab rat, an overly-innocent, sheltered high school graduate from a working class family who heads for Dupont University (a loose stand-in for Duke) with the hopes of her community and their unshakeable faith in her ability to hogtie success. Instead, Charlotte falls into the familiar traps of popularity and status, wanting to fit in and feeling left out. She stands ready to sacrifice herself, intellectually and sexually, in order to belong. At various points in the novel, Charlotte is contrasted with the laboratory experiments of the school’s doctors, which find that a culture can overwhelm the impulses of an individual.

One of the beauties of this perplexing book is that Wolfe, by setting the story in a university, is able to send up the progress of human civilization - that in the midst of all these great ideas are hormonal kids barely out of their teens, getting drunk and chasing after cheap sex, swearing all the way through. And life really doesn’t change all that much beyond the campus, even if the ideas remain. But what of the soul? Our concept of the soul has mutated along the way - the Judaic tradition borrowing from the Greek gives us a soul that is part of a community, while Christianity proclaimed God’s love for the individual. The Enlightenment then took the individual’s importance and replaced God with rationalism, meaning that we are worth something because we exist, even if there is no God. But neuroscience, like all science, promises knowledge that can be corrupted if it is used to turn mankind into masses of thoughtless automatons in the service of their nerve impulses.

This is why Wolfe is perfect for this particular story. Wolfe’s fiction is largely about status - about being and belonging. If someone does not belong, more often than not, it is a revelation that the character neither seeks nor fully understands, but the revelation is almost religious in nature. All truth becomes hypocritical because no one adheres to it. Whatever truth is revealed is usually at the expense of another, but in the end, all characters, fully-realized, are Darwinian ladder climbers who greedily pick each other off and gain their own revelations by inches. Somehow, they find a place where they belong.

When Charlotte sets off for school, she wants to create a life for herself, a “life of the mind.” In the end, Charlotte loses the person she was and becomes something else - a less uptight but more knowing individual, changed by her surroundings, but determined to be whoever it is that she now is. She is in control.

What I notice in this book, as I did in his earlier “A Man In Full,” is a phenomenon I would call “stealth Christianity.” Charlotte is so obviously a naïve, church girl, and yet this is only vaguely hinted at. There is little to bind her to her family other than their shared monetary status and the culture of good folks from the mountains. Yet this is the sort of sheltered saved girl who goes to college and discovers a world that either pays lip service to Christ or ignores Him completely. Charlie Croker, the hero of “A Man In Full,” becomes born again, only in the grip of Epictetus, the Roman philosopher instead of Jesus. In Wolfe’s fiction, which seems to catalogue virtually every aspect of modern life, faith is largely absent, hinted at, or sidestepped. The characters are more passionate about politics than God. One wonders if this is deliberate, and I would argue, it almost certainly is.

Wolfe, asked recently in an interview if he believed in God, said no. This surprised me. I had suspected that Wolfe, who revels in brandishing a conservative political worldview, was “hiding his light under a bushel.” But he also said the neuroscientist view, that there is no “ghost in the machine,” renders a life which is bereft of the mysticism that practically all of us would like to believe hides behind our tissue and bones.

The novel, and the neuroscientist view of our existence, also brings up an interesting point in a Christian discussion. Does it mean there is a biological explanation for the fallen human condition? Is the “sinful nature” something that can be found in the genome? Is the idea that we are “born into sin” something more than the simple poetry of the King James Bible? Is sin wound so tightly in the DNA that one cannot rip it apart from the human existence without destroying an essential part of us all? By novel’s end, Charlotte resolves that even if the soul is a myth, that myth is part of who she is. Discovering who she is will take the rest of her life, regardless of whether there is anything after.

Whether or not Wolfe’s novel is a success or failure, he does deserve some credit for tackling a question that science serves up for us all, whether we have the guts to face it or not. If this column reads like it wrote itself, then perhaps the neuroscientists aren’t far off after all.

I will read almost any novel devoted to school life within first-world countries (slightly disappointed in myself over this disclosure, but a fact's a fact.) I was glad to get this very thick book at a reasonable price. And then I started reading Wolfe's protagonist. I related to her at times; wanted to smack her at other times. I was disappointed to see young women disregarded and discounted and even sometimes abused on almost every page.

At the book's sudden end, I definitely felt cheated. I had to re-read the last 20 pages and make certain whether each character got what he or she deserved or got forgotten about entirely. (Note: most of the females get forgotten about, because apparently they are worth no one's time.)

I have a feeling that this book will not age well. The story was possibly obsolete at the moment of publication. Although maybe with some amusement a group of high school grads should be assigned to read it and see what really happens. It's like the Worst-Case-Scenario handbook for big universities. Even though I never attended a big university for any extended period, I cannot believe they are like that. Also, I cannot believe that the same small group of characters encountered each other so regularly and solely contributed it to coincidence. Small town girl meets newspaper editor meets frat president meets basketball star. I think not.

Redneck Haiku Review

Variations on A Middle Age
Advancing postures.
Kama Sutra gambit. Please,
the chiropractor!

I wish I could give this a minus star

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

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

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

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

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

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