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.

"I am Tom Wolfe... " and therefore I can write whatever I want. And people will still buy my over-long, thinly-developed, poorly-constructed tirade against 'kids these days.'

It's called a stereotype, Tom. You should probably avoid making all your characters painfully simple cardboard cutouts of actual people. And I'm pretty sure I've seen all of these before, in EVERY movie and book about "college" ever produced.

To inventory:
- The main protagonist, the archetypical smart girl who's better looking than she realizes.
- The big dumb jock who's smarter than he realizes
- The beautiful-but-evil roommate
- The nerdy reporter for the school paper
- The obnoxious, privileged frat boy
- And a whole host of minor supporting characters... as the secretary from Ferris Bueller put it, a cast of "sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, and d!ckheads." Along with rednecks, the new england rich, and a smattering of other cellophane-thin stereotypes.

This book isn't quite satire, it isn't quite commentary, isn't remotely insightful, but it is awfully long. It has that going for it.

Yawn or cringe? Eye roll? So imagine your grandpa takes you out to the Dog 'n Suds for a root beer float. He goes on to tell you about what life was like at college - not for him but for you. He sprinkles in terms like "phat" and "shorty" and "rad" and "rutting" throughout his tale. Grandpa has been dipping into the Dictionary of American Youth Slang written by the Youth Minister at his church, who has covered the volume in a plain black cover lest it fall into the hands of the few blessed innocents out there, people like Charlotte Simmons, who would only become distraught at how _dirty_ and crude people are.

The point of all of this? Grandpa wants to make sure you know that college is a place of wildly raging hormones, cliques one hoped would have magically disappeared once the threshhold of the high school's doors have been crossed one last time, and LOTS of liquor. You know, in case you missed it on your trip through. He also wants to be sure you know what kind of bullet you dodged at your alma mater and how relieved you should be about it. *ahem*

Don't forget to let Grandpa know that he has dribbled ketchup all down his white suit while talking. You don't want him to be embarrassed by himself, now do you?
________

Disclaimer: The grandpa (Tom Wolfe-like)in this account is fictitious (sorta) and bears no resemblance whatsoever to the author's own grandpa, with the exception of the love of a good A&W root beer float.

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 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.

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.

One of my all-time favorite books. It has its flaws, but I loved it when I read it for the first time back in 2005, and I love it just as much every time I re-read it.

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.

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 can totally understand why readers would criticize Tom Wolfe for dealing in stereotypes, for overwriting, and for taking a bit of a weird turn with the whole neuroscience thing. But I still enjoyed reading I Am Charlotte Simmons, and I still think it's a good book by a great writer. I went to college within recent memory, and am a graduate student now. While Wolfe plays up various aspects of the prestigious university experience, he's not all that far off the mark. His imitations of rap music are absolutely terrible and he doesn't seem to get college profs all that well, but fortunately those aspects of the book weren't too overpowering. The cartoony characters and ::::::STATIC::::: are just part of Wolfe's over-the-top, big-over-small style, and I've made my peace with that.

The thing that makes Wolfe's writing great is also the thing that makes it the most uncomfortable to read. Love them, hate them, or call them stereotypical, but Wolfe's characters think thoughts that are so egotistical, ridiculous, and raw that you feel embarrassed. Not embarrassed for his characters, but embarrassed because they are a lot more like you than you'd care to admit. The ways Wolfe's characters think about how others think about them are totally shallow and ridiculous, but they also aren't that far from reality. And while Wolfe is definitely a bit of a grandpa complaining about kids these days, with their "f*** patois" and hookup culture, he's also correct about how ridiculous and hedonistic that stuff can be. Even more importantly for a nerd like me, Wolfe hits geeks and change-the-world activists right where it hurts. Adam's megalomaniacal rants are ridiculous, but I can see a lot of myself in him. Randy and Camille are perhaps overly aggressive as activists, and Camille's rants about sexism veer towards the obnoxious and absurd, but I have definitely interacted with people like her (and understood where they were coming from). It's uncomfortable, it's ugly, and it's what Tom Wolfe does best.

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.

Sigh...

It's no fun writing a hatchet job, much less a hatchet job on one of your heroes. I read Charlotte Simmons about a year ago and hated it, but decided that the generousity of the Christmas Spirit might make it the perfect time for me to read it. Jesus it was even worse.

I love Tom Wolfe, his early journalism is alive as very few works I know. His critism is sharp and cutting and can make a whole school of thought look ridiculous in a clever turn of phrase. His novels are flawed sure but like his journalism the sheer verve and style of his prose carries them across whatever bumps they might have.

Until Charlotte Fucking Simmons.

The problem is that since Hooking Up Tom Wolfe has found himself fascinated by post modern philosphy. He's no longer concerned with writing about individuals but has instead decided to focus on the misfiring chemicals in their brain in a probablistic equation. He makes Kurt Vonnegut look like Saint Augustine when it comes to subject of free will and it's sucked the life write out of his books. It's heartbreaking.

Worse yet is he's lost his ear for society and character. Ms. Simmons who has been raised around meth mouths and shit kickers would not be shocked by an errant Silver Bullet Tall Boy.

The book goes from muddled to straight out surreal about midway through where Wolfe suddenly decides to play a two hundred page game of "Whose's going to bust Charlotte Simmon's Cherry." which would be bad enough if Wolfe didn't narrate the proceedings with the smirk of a dirty old uncle.

It's sad that Zadie Smith accomplished in a page long vignette in On Beauty what it took Wolfe 700 odd pages to not accomplish.