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.

Brings back lots of college memories. This could almost be a required reading for any teenager planning to join the madness, in a good sense, that is college in the United States.

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.

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.

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.

I got so much enjoyment out of this book. If you attempt to read it as an actual piece of literature (or, God forbid, actually purchase it) you will be incredibly insulted and possibly enraged. I wouldn't even deign to call these characters stereotypes because I think that would be giving them more credit than they rightly deserve. And if you read it as the desperate attempt of an aging writer to remain relevant, it might just make you sad (unless you are already enraged/insulted in which case feelings of hatred may render you unable to feel pity). This is the literary equivalent of Crossroads with Britney Spears. Instead, read it to revel in the hilariously awful (oh sorry, Mr. Wolfe, I meant "well-researched") writing. Especially enjoy the abundant use of the phrase "mons pubis." Seriously.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.