(SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!! BEWARE!!!!!!!!!!!)
FINALLY finished I Am Charlotte Simmons. I would've enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn't dragged out my reading for so long.
I found myself totally offended at the end of the book because Charlotte did not maintain one girl friend in the entire story and all of the girls in the novel were either stereotypical sorority types, shallow, gossips or over the top radical. And her life during her first year of college completely revolved around her relationships with three men. I was so infuriated with Charlotte when she got her terrible first semester grades. And by her paralysis after being so hurt by Hoyt. Maybe I'm just completely insensitive. In ways, i really got where Tom Wolfe was coming from with his representation of college life, but he managed to take every stereotype to such an extreme and he is surely out of touch. don't get me started with the ending. i must be missing something. I love you lauren.

I only read 50% of the book because it was for uni and omg what a pain in the ass. I hated this book SO much!!

I read this book years ago and saw it on my friend's bookshelf today. I had to add it to my bookshelf because I LOVED it. It's about a girl who grew up fairly poor in a small town and she goes off to college. It put right back in college. It was amazing! One of my favorite books ever. All of you have to read it!!!

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

Hmmm...I don't know how to sum this book up, because the ending left me with a very weird taste in my mouth - it seemed too abrupt (even after 700+pages)!

The story and characters kept me totally engrossed, mainly because they took me right back to my first few days at UC Davis and what it felt like to be thrown into such a bizarre mix of people and behaviors. Charlotte was a lot more sheltered than I was before heading off to college, but her feelings of loneliness and an intense need to belong (all while being skeptical of why she was looking for acceptance from total strangers) definitely resonated with me.

Wolfe's writing is detailed and in today's vernacular (or as close to today's college vernacular as a middle-aged, well-read guy can get), so this was a really quick read for me. I wasn't bored at any point, and often had trouble putting the book down.

Still, I have to say I am unhappy with the ending. No, every storyline and conflict didn't get tied up neatly (nor should they), but I still felt - especially after so many detail-filled pages - that some key characters' transitions did get skipped over.

Halfway through Tom Wolfe's enormous new novel about contemporary college life, I finally devised a question to keep my interest piqued: "Is it humanly possible," I wondered, "to write another 100 pages - another 200 pages, another 300 pages - without describing a single surprising event?"

It is.

With "I Am Charlotte Simmons," Wolfe has ventured onto the university campus and sent back reams of hyperventilating testimony: College students are slovenly and crude. They drink way too much. They listen to obscene music. They engage in casual and exploitative sex. They put their feet on the furniture - even leather sofas and fine woodwork.

But wait, there's more: College students would rather socialize than study. It's all right here, spelled out in tones of amazement, like George H.W. Bush telling us about those new scanners at the grocery store.

If you haven't seen "Animal House" or anything on the WB, you'll be surprised to learn that collegiate society is divided between "jocks" and "nerds." The jocks are very athletic, but not very smart, whereas the nerds are very smart, but not very athletic.

Am I going too fast?

To write this novel, Wolfe claims that he "had only to reassemble the material he had accumulated visiting campuses across the country," a technique that may explain the book's superficiality. This isn't the anthropology of the Ordinary - a potentially revelatory approach; it's just a dramatization of clichés.

Even the style lacks Wolfe's usual verve. He's particularly interested in the way modern Americans talk, but in his Rip Van Winkle voice, we get endless explanations and reenactments of what he calls the "undergraduate vocabulary," a discovery he highlights in a brief dedication to his children. Most of the dialogue is written in a profane patois that Wolfe spells out as though he's recording the grunts and clicks of a lost dialect from Inner Mongolia. But he has nothing to add to Norman Mailer's far more daring analysis of American profanity some 40 years ago in "Armies of the Night."

Even more tedious than the affected slips of Southern and African-American dialects are his needless parenthetical translations: I can't (cain't) stand them('em). And when characters yell at each other, their words are written in caps so that we know THEY'RE SPEAKING VERY LOUDLY.

The story follows the rise and fall of Charlotte Simmons, a brilliant country bumpkin from Sparta, N.C., (pop. 900), who wins a scholarship to Dupont University, one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. Charlotte's parents are simple folk, devout Christians, who have instilled in their daughter a deep sense of morality. They don't drink, swear, put on airs, or take no stock in your highfalutin citified ways. Along with a devoted teacher at school, they have instilled in Charlotte a sense of her exceptionalism that inspires the novel's title, which is also a sort of inspirational mantra for the heroine.

Charlotte heads off to Dupont University expecting to enter the august halls of academe, but she quickly finds that it's a brothel, seething with vain, vicious girls and crude, drunken boys. Her snobby roommate won't have anything to do with her. The coed bathrooms are an abomination. Athletes on the basketball team don't take their classes seriously. And hunky frat boys pretend to be interested in your mind, but they're interested in only one thing. (I won't spoil it for you.)

Poor Charlotte is consumed with loneliness and confusion. Everyone mocks her clothes, her naiveté, her virginity, her tee-totaling. Professors recognize her brilliance, but brilliance doesn't matter in this marketplace of drunken flesh. So, how can she resist when the hottest boy on campus asks her to the Spring Formal? (Wolfe Note: The term "hottest" is not a reference to the temperature of his body, but to the developed musculature of his body, which, along with a number of male bodies in this book, is described with slobbering attention.)

Meanwhile, one of the nerds who works for the school paper (where else?) is pursuing a scandal that could rock American politics, but don't worry about that potentially interesting thread; it never leads off campus - or toward anything.

The only issue that develops some traction in this novel is race. Wolfe explored that more profoundly in "The Bonfire of Vanities" and "A Man in Full," but his portrayal here of the racial tensions on the college basketball court is engaging. He shows a sport played largely by black men for the entertainment of white fans in an academic setting that contorts its principles to keep the whole industry going.

The cynical coach reaps millions; the pasty professor growls about academic standards; the expedient college president maintains an uneasy truce. All these characters play to type, but at the center of this subplot is a white basketball star who feels threatened by the talent and aggression of black players all around him. Why, he wonders, do they have access to a whole range of words and stances that are forbidden to him? What's more, he's starting to feel attracted to a life of the mind that he can just barely imagine. But this minor development is buried in a variety of borrowed plot lines, including a climactic bit of satire about political correctness that might have been sharp 20 years ago.

The problem isn't really the inclusion of so many cliché characters; sadly, there are plenty of real students who fall into these categories. What's galling about this novel is its persistent lack of nuance, its reduction of the whole spectrum of people on a college campus to these garish primary colors.

Wolfe wrote a much discussed essay for Harper's in 1989, "A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel." Instead of the cerebral games that now pass for fiction, he argued, American novelists should "head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property." This is good advice. When he took it, he hog-stomped out two baroque novels, first about New York and then about Atlanta. But cooped up on campus with "Charlotte Simmons" he's too predictable and too late to reclaim anything of interest.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1109/p1...

Can you know that a book is existentially ridiculous and still love it? I’m not quite talking about in the “a movie so bad it’s good” sense. I don’t read I am Charlotte Simmons in the spirit of mockery, and I don’t think it’s totally inept, except in one particular way - it is exactly a book about young college students written by a man in his 70s. Everything about the characterization of Charlotte and the people around her seems anachronistic and tonally wrong. The slang is terrible, the expression of social mores is funny, the very picture of youth is all wrong. And yet there’s something so loving in this portrait, and so endearing in its quaint values and stabs at relevance, that I enjoyed every page. Wolfe's story is engaging, and while Charlotte is 100% a symbol of things he doesn't understand, she's also an inherently compelling protagonist. So funny that the synopsis of this book highlight's Wolfe's satirical wit, as there's nothing resembling effective satire here. Instead, there's a sweet sharp story that exists despite itself and a character out of time that fails in depiction but sings from a place of pure sentiment.

Can you imagine people chanting "Go go, JoJo" at a player named JoJo at a basketball court? I sure can't! It's rhythmically terrible. But it's exactly what I like about this daft book.

L'ULTIMA BRAVA RAGAZZA AMERICANA
Partita con la curiosità di leggere quella che doveva essere una lucida e spietata analisi dell’ambiente universitario americano, fatta da un grande “vecchio” come Tom Wolfe (ben oltre la boa dei settanta anni), sono rimasta sinceramente perplessa, e mi chiedo se sono solo io ad aver avuto la sensazione di rivedere semplicemente uno dei tanti film che il cinema ci ha propinato negli ultimi decenni (stile American Pie, o dintorni).
Charlotte, l’autentica brava ragazza americana, di origini modeste, secchiona, e pure vergine (ma già questa idealizzazione di partenza induce a sospettare che per Wolfe le brave ragazze americane proprio non esistono), parte dal natio paesello di provincia per andare a studiare in una delle migliori università (nella finzione, la Dupont University), carica di mille ambizioni e aspettative, e scopre che, orrore!, l’ambiente universitario non è poi così idilliaco. Anzi.

Ma ci voleva questo romanzo per apprendere che, anche nelle migliori università USA, gli atleti delle squadre sportive hanno a disposizione corsi per cosiddetti semianalfabeti, che permettono loro di laurearsi tranquillamente, concentrandosi solo sull’attività agonistica; che le confraternite studentesche sono in realtà centri in cui si allacciano le cerchie di amicizia e di interesse tra i potenti delle generazioni di domani; che i dormitori universitari sono spesso teatro di festini promiscui, di scherzi sadici, e che i verdi campus sono anche luoghi di confusione, sporcizia e violenza, dove chi vuol davvero studiare fatica a trovare la concentrazione; e che chi si rintana nel silenzio delle biblioteche, e non si atteggia a gallina cheerleader, proprio come Charlotte, finisce per essere emarginata, boicottata, ferita?

In realtà, come ho premesso, io non sono riuscita a cogliere questa acuta analisi sociologica, né ho trovato gran novità nella narrazione della caduta e della iniziazione-trasformazione di Charlotte (trasformazione, peraltro, talmente enigmatica e buonista, che non saprei se definirla con certezza una vittoria della protagonista. Protagonista per cui, a dirla tutta, non ho provato grande simpatia).

Ecco, di questo libro corposo (quasi 780 pagine), mi rimarrà piuttosto il ricordo delle parolacce, un fiume continuo di volgarità, che nelle intenzioni del vecchio scrittore dovevano forse rendere l’ambiente giovanilistico, ma che alla fine hanno appesantito inutilmente la (mia) lettura. In ogni caso, anche le parolacce non mi paiono un gran elemento di novità: quasi tutti i film ambientati nei campus americani ne sono pieni.

"Tom Wolfe is one of my favorite authors and this book does not disappoint at all. Criticism usually regards the authors comprehension and use of language and expressions as well as descriptions of people out of his circles, but being a non-native English speaker I have come to the conclusion that I'm too far removed from these circles or unable to pick up nuances to the extent that it really does not matter at all to me - either that or the critique is just plain wrong. The other gripe is usually that Wolfe have a slight tendency of literary elephantiasis. At around two thirds of this book I kind agreed that some tough editing would have been in place - only to realize that the narrative describing Charlotte's descent into depression is so painfully and excruciatingly good that I just wished for it to end. "

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.

She was naked, she had seen her little brother's thing and her father's once when he got out of the shower, but this big thing, a ball-peen hammer... He thrust ball-peen hammer right into her and it went nowhere, he thrust again with a grunt this time, got nowhere, a wave of pain rose, another thrust nowhere, ahhhh, "it hurt!" he didn't stop for an instant... he thrust and broke through she let out a yelp of pain more than pain surprise and more than pain and surprise insult this thing was stuck in her innards in out in out "ouch"...

Dupont University: the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition....Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina, who has come here on full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.