Redneck Haiku Review

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

3.5 Stars
I almost don't know where to begin with this review. I have so many thoughts swirling around in my head, which is definitely the sign of a good book, but this is also a bit of a bizarre book.

Wolfe brought all of his investigative reporting background to writing this novel, by stepping onto multiple college campuses in his 70's to observe and talk with students there. I was a college student at a large public university from 2002-2006, and this book was published in 2004. Wolfe definitely nailed a lot of the college vibe, lingo, dress, and personalities present on campus. However, it creates this interesting dynamic in the novel, because he often has to stop and explain the "patois" of the lingo to the reader, which makes it feel like his audience is other older adults who are not or did not live this experience. So it feels a bit strange, what drew this 70+ year old man to this subject matter.

In some ways I could relate to Charlotte Simmons, she came from a more sheltered and conservative background and gets dropped into a college where there is so much freedom it borders on feeling hedonistic, and not always knowing how to navigate that divide between her old world and her new one. However, I felt like his characterization of Charlotte as being a lone reed, so to speak, amongst her peers in this regard feels off. In a large university, there are so many different, with so many different backgrounds and interests. I never had trouble to find many friends who I could relate to.

His depictions of "Sexiling", the herds of freshman girls traveling about campus everywhere, the going out/nightlife culture felt so accurate.

Ultimately, while there was redemption and growth and change in some of the characters, this novel also felt really dark, and a bit gloomy and depressing. I do think it was hyperbolic to emphasize the culture of the 21st century college experience. However, I guess I don't get the point of this book, or who the intended audience is. Because the reality is, given the advances in technology and the changes in our world because of COVID, college experiences, probably look even more different still than this now 17 year old book.

Ultimately, the book made me reminisce about my college days and wax nostalgic for some of my favorite people and places.

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.

Read over 200 pages & didn't like it

I came to I Am Charlotte Simmons with trepidation. I had read the reviews that likened Wolfe to a voyeur and questioned his motivation in spending years "observing" typical college students fifty years his junior. It seemed creepy. But when I saw it in the bargain bin, I couldn't resist, and as it turned out, I couldn't put the thing down. Wolfe is a great writer and storyteller, and although there are some weird things about the book, like his linguistic obsessions over current uses of profanity, he presents a compelling story and a fascinating character in Charlotte. Charlotte, a brilliant student from the impoverished, rural North Carolina, earns a scholarship to the prestigious Dupont University, and dreams of intellectual stimulation unlike she has ever known. Instead, she finds a world of wealth, privilege, and debauchery. Although she wants to play the games of sexual intrigue of her classmates, she has none of the requisite accompanying hardness and cynicism, so her efforts are personally devastating. Wolfe deftly tackles big themes--purity, vanity, greed, social class. He may have gotten some of the details wrong, and if you are currently a college student I'm sure you will find much with which to quarrel, but the bigger story is superb.

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

'In I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe gives us a tabula rasa from the Blue Ridge mountains who attends prestigious Dupont University only to find herself caught in the prevailing cultural, moral, and human maelstrom of American college life at the turn of the century. We all walked past buildings at Duke, but Wolfe seems to have seen through them.'

Read the full review, "Bonfire of the Varsities," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

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.

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.

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.

Tom Wolfe is of the opinion that the novel, while still able to be subjected to literary and intellectual criticism, is nevertheless in a declining state as a strict form of entertainment, which is arguably its chief function when stripped of the more partisan and progressive causes that motivate some early, as well as many contemporary, novelists. People seem to take for granted the profound effect novels have on societies and on culture as being premeditatively instigated by the authors themselves; that an author can simultaneously be inspired to heights of literary creativity, even as he/she tailors that creativity and perspicacity for words into a force of nature capable of effecting social change. Wolfe isn't Upton Sinclair, though. He's Balzac. Or better yet, Dickens: for his moral sense definitely shines through and occupies a distinct presence; but the vivacity of his prose, his biting and at times keel-over-laughing wit, and the brooding sensation that in every character is somehow, inexplicably, a bit of your own self that you've thought you could deny or brush under the table, erasing all evidence but the hastily scrawled marginalia notes confirming the notion that you the reader could in any way be as pathetic as some of the characters are at times reduced to . . . well, let's just say that this tremendously acute liveliness and organic quality to Wolfe's social insight is never at war with his moral sense. Like Dickens, Wolfe understands that having a morality, or a conscience, doesn't mean denying that there are forces that oppose your conscience, or that the human conscience is in any way the sole force governing human behavior.

In fact, "I Am Charlotte Simmons" goes far--VERY far--towards illustrating the myriad motivations and complex matrices of desires, mysteriously mimetic as well as morosely myopic, that energize behavior at the peak of adulthood, i.e. the ages of 18-22; as well as showing that such desires reverberate throughout all of life from that point onward, so much so that all your adult decisions, whether made when you're 30, 50, or 70, are in some way a reminiscence of that time of your life.

None of these characters are stereotyped; all are complex. In high school, Hoyt Thorpe is an underprivileged teenager deprived of a father-figure who nevertheless becomes a prodigious social activist who makes national headlines for his mission to provide food for homeless urbanites, but he uses that prestige to help him gain entrance into the prestigious Ivy League Dupont University. Once there, he proceeds to become--at once--every college girl's worst nightmare and dream come true. As if the pendulum between his character's attributes isn't already in full sway, amidst his bacchanalian exploits and carefully habituated insouciance he harbors deep-set insecurities, if not outright denial, of his unfortunate and imminent predicament, that once he graduates, his dismal transcript virtually precludes his possibility of employment in a Wall Street investment banking firm. This is no stereotypical college male; this is THE college male of an East Coast Ivy. This is the postmodern F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, a Fitzgerald redux, albeit in a douchefied and decidedly less-literarily bent persona--all of which compounds upon the effect, the haunting familiarity that Hoyt Thorpe possesses from both a literary standpoint like this, i.e. the "postmodern" (term used loosely) inheritor of an East Coast prep legacy, and also the familiarity he has for the male gender more generally: for what we are, what we want to or have wanted to be, what college turned us into, what we tried to become, or what we've tried to resist acknowledging about ourselves. A character who can inspire such a myriad of psychological resemblances is in no way static. Indeed, his complexity screams at the reader from multiple angles, making his story as enticing as that of Wolfe's protagonist, Charlotte herself. Just imagine if the depth of Charlotte's own personality were to be examined in suit (it is).

One final note. I do not believe it's too much of a generalization to say that any novel has the potential to hold a particular resonance, a specific form of entertainment value, for every different reader. To read this novel today, in this year, and while between the ages of 18 and 24, is to identify with it on a different level than an older audience. The professional reviews (I've read several) of this novel are/were composed by tremendously intelligent people WHO ARE, NEVERTHELESS, NECESSARILY PRECLUDED FROM ENGAGING WITH AND EXPERIENCING THE EFFECT OF THIS NOVEL ON AN IDEAL LEVEL, BY VIRTUE OF THEIR NOT BEING, IN THIS DAY, IN THEIR LATE TEENS OR THEIR TWENTIES. If I were to have taken the advice of these reviewers (with the exception of one or two) I would not have read this book, and the 20 minutes I spent in Barnes & Noble silently debating whether or not to buy it, would have ended in me walking out of the store empty handed. I cannot claim that some kind of rebellious tendency to prove the reviewers wrong incited me to go ahead with the purchase, and quite contrastingly, I was very much inclined to take the larger critical consensus and devote my hours towards some other literary endeavor. The two reasons I walked out of the store with the seventeen dollar copy of "I Am Charlotte Simmons" were, firstly, that I read the prologue (instantly gripping), and more importantly, that I am 23 years old, a fresh university graduate, nostalgic for the past while excited for the future. Thus, at this particular moment in my life, a novel like "I Am Charlotte Simmons," that is hilariously haunting and has an emotionally macabre familiarity to the life I've recently bid farewell too, has an appeal to me like it never had before, and never will have again. I doubt any of the professional reviewers can claim such a personal literary resonance with this novel, though I hope they can claim it with SOME novel, because the experience is one of tremendous sublimity. I suppose that the stars aligned, as it were, and things just happened to work out for me in a way that ensured that I would engage with THIS novel on a deeper and more emotionally personal level than most others. I graduated from UCLA; I came across this book on wikipedia; bought it a few weeks later after much deliberation; laughed my fucking ass off; seared my soul to those of these characters; learned about myself and about the world I've just left; learned about the world I'm going in to; loved every goddamn minute of it. Reviews for this novel have been lukewarm at best, and I can't really refute them (or I can, but it would require multiple essays, some of which I may perhaps write in the future), and thus, I can't truly convince anyone whose not in my position to read this book. But this is my book. It's about me. It describes me in a way that I never thought possible. So it's my favorite book. The stars aligned. Who would've thought.