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    I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel
    I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel
    I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel
    Audiobook (abridged)9 hours

    I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel

    Written by Tom Wolfe

    Narrated by Dylan Baker

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    2005 Audie Award Finalist

    America's "peerless observer" (People) uncovers college life—from jocks to mutants, dormcest to tailgating—plus race, class, sex, and basketball

    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 uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.

    As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite—her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turn of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock- obsessed campus—she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.

    With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the ‘00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateNov 1, 2004
    ISBN9781593975784
    Author

    Tom Wolfe

    Tom Wolfe was the author of more than a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Man in Full. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his BA at Washington and Lee University and a PhD in American studies at Yale.

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    Reviews for I Am Charlotte Simmons

    3.5/5

    991 ratings46 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Disappointed by abridged version of this audio book. Too much left out.
    • 1/5
      Oh, I cannot! This is nothing worse than an old dude writing about young women. This is so inauthentic.
    • 3/5
      I think if I hadn't been listening to this novel on CD, I never would have finished it. The pace is excruciatingly slow. The story, however, was fairly interesting and compelling -- at least enough that since my reading was passive and occurring while driving, I didn't feel the need to switch it off.What everyone tends to marvel over is how well Tom Wolfe, an old man, writes Charlotte, a young girl. Well, most of those people probably aren't young college girls either. He does a fairly good job of portraying the macro-experience of college life, but he never adequately manages to motivate Charlotte, or explain her reactions.Perhaps the worst thing about his book is the language. I'm no prude, and certainly heard and sometimes used that kind of language on my college campus, but since I was listening to it in my car, I never knew when I was going to be stopped at a light with my windows down, and have a character let out a string of obscenities that made me worry how much the car next to me could hear.I don't think I'd read it again, but neither do I hugely regret having listened to it. Kinda wishy-washy, I know, but that is really the best I can do!
    • 2/5
      It took me forever to read this and for a 700 page book there wasn't much of a pay-off. All this build up, to the main "climax" and then another 200 pages of follow-up.
    • 3/5
      It has been 30 years since I started college, and in those years, nothing has fundamentally changed. The clothes, music, language and technology is all different, yes, but the fundamentals remain the same.

      Freshmen struggle with the transition from high school and home to college courses and dorm life. Good students find themselves being challenged by their class assignments. Smart girls do stupid things and bitchy girls do bitchy things.

      Absolutely nothing shocking here; just young people being young people.

      Charlotte Simmons herself is a bit of a cipher, maybe. I don't understand why she became such a conformist in college; she really should have been past the conformity-prone years by that time. Her self-consciousness was really painful. Her need to compete with the other girls was startling, and her total lack of any female bonding represented a serious developmental flaw in her character.

      The storyline of JoJo Johanssen was one of the more interesting ones; I did cheer him on.

      The only mystery in this novel was finding out who the "source inside the St Ray house" was. Of course, I. P. was the obvious choice, but I thought it was possible that someone else might have sold out Hoyt Thorp. It is intriguing to think about what happened to Hoyt after the events in this novel.....I guess I can sincerely say that I sort of hope things sucked for him.

      The single most annoying incident in the book was Adam's meeting with Professor Quat. How Adam could have trusted him with the truth is beyond me. Wolfe's description of Quat's office decor made me groan and his whole diatribe on the '60's was thankfully short: the obnoxious, insidious, era-ist propaganda issuing forth from Quat made me wish that Adam would punch him in the face. I don't want to hear that shit about the sixties, man, so shut the hell up about it, already!

      The ending was....baffling in regards to Charlotte herself. It seems to me like she just gave up on herself and decided to live in the reflected glory of her man. Sad.
    • 2/5
      This held so much promise. I love novels set around college campuses and the character of Charlotte is endearing...at first. Less than halfway through the book I think Wolfe went a little nuts in trying to make the novel as college as possible. It was like every trope and stereotype you might associate with college in one book, and it wasn't particularly successful. The ending was unsatisfying and I grew to dislike every single character. Overall, a very disappointing read.
    • 4/5
      I bought this novel because I have heard of the author and have always wanted to read one of his books. I wasn't disappointed, for the most part. The main character, Charlotte Simmons, is a bright young girl who wants to live "the life of the mind" when she starts her freshman year at Dupont University. She has lived a sheltered life, so focused on leaving the small town of Sparta, North Carolina, that she hasn't had the typical teenage life. Things change and she meets three young man who will have an impact on her, in various ways.
      I won't say anymore, not wanting the spoil the many surprises and twists that await. The only reason why I didn't give it five stars is because, even though is nearly seven hundred pages, I felt the ending was rushed.
    • 2/5
      Country girl goes to college (probably a fictionalized Duke). Just askin' but why does an old guy like Tom Wolfe always write about the young people? Jonathan Franzen doesn't have these May-December issues; a Tom Wolfe.for our times?
    • 1/5
      I've given up an hour and twenty two minutes into this audiobook. After an amusing initial episode following the thoughts of a college kid who is evidently destined to become the modern Sherman McCoy/master of the universe, it's been nothing but unbearable adolescent whining, self-pity, and angst from the title character. I can't possibly spend another 29 hours on this audiobook. Just, no.
    • 3/5
      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 3 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 charcter 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 relatable 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 millenial 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
    • 3/5
      It's a Tom Wolf novel, which these days means insightful and funny at times, and way too long.
    • 2/5
      I was very disappointed in this book. I enjoyed his 2 other novels very much, but this book was full of cliched characters that had no depth to them. There was really no plot and the main character was was totally flat and boring. Her problems were all self inflicted. I also felt that Tom Wolfe wrote about a subject matter(college life) that would be better done by someone who was more familiar and closer to the situation. As others have mentioned, I will no longer automatically read something because it was written by Tom Wolfe. I gave it 2 stars because it was at least easy to read but I would not recommend it.
    • 5/5
      Mir hat das Buch sehr gut gefallen. Es setzt sich kritisch mit den unterschiedlichsten ENtwicklungen in den Vereinigten Staaten bzw. in der Jugendkultur auseinander. Läßt einem sein eigenes Verhalten überdenken und mahnt ein wenig davor, alte Werte nicht vorschnell beiseite zu legen und seine Handlungen gut zu überdenken. in
    • 4/5
      Tom Wolf has the ability to capture the essence of an era and place. In this case, he places us on an elite college campus in the mid-2000's, pre-facebook but rife with the jargon and social issues of the time (gay rights, wall street hubris). He also beautifully describes the social caste system that exists on the campus and the various groups that develop as a result: the untouchable demi-gods of the basketball team, the dysfunctional fraternity culture and the intellectual activists who arise in response to those cultures. Into this mix, he inserts a naive freshman, Charlotte, who is intellectually equal, if not superior, to any of her fellow classmates but socially encumbered by her isolation and self-consciousness. She knows that her family's lack of sophistication and financial wealth places her at a disadvantage. Worse, she allows herself to be influenced by the oppressive peer pressures that cause her to abandon some deep realities within herself. She intersects with the jock culture, the frat system and the intellectuals in ways that are perhaps a bit of a stretch of reality but the intersection makes for a lively story. Throw in a scandal involving a prominent national politician visiting campus and you have an intricate plot that seems to be veering in wildly unconnected directions until, in Wolf's signature plot move, it suddenly comes crashing back into focus and reveals the underlying connections.I felt this was an authentic portrayal of life on campus. Except for some dialogue and available technology, this same story could have taken place anytime from the late 20th century until today. The emotions and characters have always existed wherever you have a critical mass of students wrestling with the dilemmas of adulthood for the first time. Tom Wolfe is a master observer of human emotions and motivations, as well as the day-to-day details of the lives of undergraduates.It is the story of pride vanquished, of innocence lost, of maturity approached and ultimately of compromises accepted. If you are someone with your college years ahead of you, it can offer some lessons on what should remain important. If your college years are behind you (as mine are by many years) some of the scenes will be hauntingly familiar and may elicit memories of times that were happy, lonely, shameful, and even deeply transforming.The book dragged in spots but soon picked up the pace and became engrossing again. Well worth the read.
    • 5/5
      Sara Nelson (author of So Many Books, So Little Time) says that you should read books that take place in settings completely different from where you are. If you are visiting your grandparents in Palm Desert, you should bring Smilla’s Sense of Snow with you in order to transport yourself away from the arid desert and into a winter wonderland. If you are back home for Thanksgiving Break you should pick up The Crimson Petal and the White so that for a moment you are living in nineteenth century England among noblemen and prostitutes. I am all for this theory of good book reading, but there is something to be said about reading what you know. I enjoy reading books about people and places I feel familiar with. That is why when I first came to Mount Holyoke College I craved books of the college genre; one book in particular. I could not seem to get my mind off of the Tom Wolfe novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, which I had read in high school. I felt close to the title character Charlotte because we were both North Carolina girls from the foothills attending a New England college and attempting to carve out a successful future for ourselves. During my first couple of weeks at Mount Holyoke every new college experience I had (i.e. unpacking my things in my new dorm, using the communal bathroom, eating in the dining hall) caused my thoughts to turn toward similar scenes in Charlotte Simmons. Each day, my preoccupation with the book got worse and worse until I finally reached a point where I thought enough was enough, and so I walked to the college library to check out the Tom Wolfe novel and began reading it for the second time. It was better than the first time. I could actually relate to Charlotte so much more this time around as a first-year college student trying to adjust to college life. I would read the scene of her unpacking her things in her dorm on the fifth floor and it would strike me that I was also living on the fifth floor of my dorm. I would read about Charlotte’s first time using the coed bathroom (the disgusting scene where two boys are on the toilet making crude bowel noises and boasting about it) and I would suddenly feel very grateful that I had decided to go to a women’s college. In scene after scene, chapter after chapter, I experienced a sense of familiarity that was a blessing to have during that time when I was trying to adjust to new surroundings. I will never grow tired of I Am Charlotte Simmons.
    • 4/5
      I love Tom Wolfe - "Bonfire of the Vanities" is one of my all time favourite books. But while I enjoyed the literary play in Charlotte Simmons and found it amazing that a 70 year old male could write from the perspective of an 18 year old girl I was, in the end, not convinced by storyline. Charlotte is so unbelievably naive, pure and morally superior and yet within the space of one year she seems to have sold her soul to the devil, more interested in being seen to be the girlfriend of the hot basketball star than she is in the "life of the mind" which she was so excited about when starting University. The end of the book grated on me as much as the end of the movie Grease where Sandy gives up on all her pure and inocent ways and becomes the same as all the other girls so she can get the cool boy. Read this book to enjoy the way it is written but don't read it if you want more than a one-dimensional view of the behaviour of the privileged youth of today.
    • 2/5
      I got to the point in this book where I was so far into it, I was finishing it out of sheer spite. I refused to let the simple story of a girl that could not possibly exist going through the most impossible of self-inflicted problems get the best of me. I fully accept that this accomplishment, much like the tale of Charlotte Simmons, really means nothing.Know what's interesting? I listened to this on audiobook and at the very end there is a brief interview with Tom Wolfe. At one point, he's asked if he created Charlotte as an answer to the criticism that he has all but ignored women in his writing. He had an answer that went on about how he hadn't set out to do it on purpose but that he found Charlotte so compelling as a character and he really wanted to find out what happened to her. So who is this Charlotte that is so compelling that Wolfe had to write about her? On the surface I suppose she's an intellectually stimulating virgin saving herself for marriage with no patience for those morally inferior to her but prepared to mother inferior men into superior versions of themselves. She gets to Dupont despite her inferior economic class, her lack of opportunity and her failure to have everything handed to her on a platter. She's come to college to experience intellectual pursuit only to discover that all potential women friends are simple, slutty, guttermouth girls and while all men seemingly fall at her feet, they're unworthy of Charlotte's attention due to their morally inferior character.While making Charlotte an object of conquest to three men (a starter on the basketball team, a major player in the biggest fraternity on campus and the token smart boy with a chip on his shoulder), Wolfe also makes it clear that no woman will be her true friend. Charlotte quickly alienates her roommate and makes no real attempt to create a social circle for herself outside of two hangers-on that merely get her to our fraternity guy. It really is this dull, and yet Charlotte seems to take great glee in this lack of friendship as a badge of honor. After all, why be friends with those who are morally inferior to you? Of course, she does have the guys that are constantly after her and her and her morally superior ways. And why exactly do these guys stick around after the first few conversations? She has nothing in common with these men (well, virginity with one of them and she likes him least), she is clueless about popular culture, her ability to empathize is non-existent, she has no discernible hobbies and she can't even accept a simple invitation to lunch without being completely annoyed. I can understand the equally social-awkward guy who complains constantly about his virginity putting up with some of this behavior for a prolonged period - but the player in the fraternity (even as a conquest?) or the starter on the basketball team? With no real kindness that comes from Charlotte ever - with no moment where she even remotely lets up or has a moment of fun that isn't her gushing about her being superior to others simply trying to fit in, why am I to care if this girl from a small mountain town really makes it as arm candy? Then again, it's Wolfe's fantasy and not mine.
    • 3/5
      Naive Charlotte, delighted to escape her hillbilly world on a scholarship to a prestigious private university, sees her ideals collapse when discovering the moronic, privileged world of spoiled rich kids. Enjoyable, but sure to offend some (for many possible reasons). Also possibly annoying are the repetitive, staccato-style, incoherent, rambling thoughts of many clueless and bewildered characters, which makes the book wordy. Clichés? Maybe. But, then again, there's only a thin line between fiction and reality sometimes...
    • 3/5
      Not the most flattering picture of Duke, but I can definitely picture the different characters and types. Wolfe does a great job of creating a relatively unlikeable and simultaneously pitiable lead character. An uncomfortable read at parts, but that is just a credit to it being written well. I would recommend this book to a limited audience on an individual basis, but would be very interested in finding out what others from the Duke community thought of this book.
    • 4/5
      As overwrought as this book is, it contains exciting glimpses of the modern college experience. Despite the fundementally unappealing portrayl, I felt proud to point out the parts of my "glory days" that I recognized on the page. Perhaps even more poignant were the glimpses of the painful trial by fire each of our "little pond" personas had to go through when tested against the anonymity and hive-mind of college.
    • 2/5
      I really wanted to enjoy this novel because I've been a big fan of Tom Wolfe's writing for a long time. In fact, "Bonfire of the Vanities" remains one of my favorite books; I worked on Wall Street during the 1980s and he absolutely nailed the air of hubris and self-absorption that pervaded the time and place. Similarly, I found "A Man in Full" to be a really perceptive fictional treatment of life in the 1990s. Unfortunately, Wolfe misses badly with this expose of college life in the new millennium. I had two main problems with this novel. First, while still a keen observer of social interactions, the author's "big picture" insights are hardly bold or new. Basically, Wolfe builds his story around the following observations: (1) college students like to drink and have sex, (2) student bodies are stratified along economic, racial, and class lines, (3) most college athletes aren't particularly good students, and (4) sometimes professors act out of self-interest. Perhaps I'm too familiar with the subject--I teach at a university somewhat similar to the one described in the book--but I suspect that anyone who has ever been to college will not be shocked or entertained by these revelations. My second problem with the world Wolfe creates is that not one of the characters is remotely likeable or even particularly interesting. As other readers have noted, Charlotte is portrayed as naïve to the point of being unbelievable. More fundamentally, though, the way she turns her back on everything and everyone she stands for in the span of a few short months makes her very hard to root for. Most of the others--JoJo, Hoyt, Beverly, Adam--are one-dimensional and come off as mere cartoons. Sadly, after finishing the book, I couldn't think of a single character whose story was compelling enough to redeem the experience of having slogged through almost 700 pages. I'm still a fan of Tom Wolfe, but after this book I won't automatically buy and read his next one.
    • 4/5
      The book indicts American higher education as being shallow, booze-filled, purposeless, and filled with immorality, detailing the corruption of an intelligent, naive girl. The story is well-considered and mature. Its characters were well-developed, and they behaved in internally consistent ways. It's a little like a tragedy. Wolfe stretches all that is normally small into bigger and bigger proportions. The main character experiences a spiritual crisis and is both victim and perpetrator of cultural snobbery, i.e., morality is simply for the little people who fail to understand the complexities that are innate to human nature. She likes the guy she shouldn't. She can't like her intellectual equal. She gets hurt, so on and so forth, but the story isn't as clichéd as I make it sound. It's fleshy and new, interesting.In the end, the novel is multi-layered. It's about higher education, but it's also simply about one girl (I don't say woman, because she isn't one) being startled by the absence of morality at her ivy league school. It's about the brilliance of a star growing dim. She cannot achieve without being constantly admired, so she settles for being liked instead of being good. She lacks moral judgement and courage.Thumbs up from me. If you can stomach the copious amounts of sex, drinking, poor English, disrespect for all things beautiful, and general debauchery, then give it a go. By the way, right now I don't feel like being all political and editorializing about the current lack of educating that goes on in schools but--I shall just say--it's not a baseless indictment.
    • 4/5
      It seems odd that Tom Wolfe, would attempt to write the college story from a female perspective. However, his daughters have recently graduated from college so I suppose he was inspired by their stories. He seems to have gotten inside the female mind to a reasonable degree but there are nuances that he just doesn't seem to have gotten.Charlotte Simmons, the eponymous heroine is from Sparta, North Carolina, an american small town. As class valedictorian and academic superstar, she is expected to go far, and is due to attend Ivy League Dupont university. She expects to meet her intellectual equals at Dupont, something which has eluded her so far in Sparta. However, she is disappointed to find that students are Dupont appear to be more obsessed with drinking, partying, making out and sports, than they appear to be with studying. Wolfe also highlights the importance of sports teams to the american university system.The story in not told solely from the perspective of Charlotte Simmons. We also meet frat boy king Hoyt Thorpe who is determined to be remembered as a legend within his frat house and white basketball star Jojo Johansson who undergoes a seachange in his attitude to his studies.I mainly like the character of Charlotte Simmons, though I did find her a little sanctimonius and overly naive at times. However, her growing attempts to fit in and be seen as popular will reverbate with lots of readers. The most endearing character in the book, as far as I'm concerned is Johansson, who is determine to move beyond the jock athlete stereotype.The book is quite long, but it literally zips by due to Wolfe's pacy writing and I never once found it a chore. Critics of the book have said that it does not accurately reflect college life but I never once felt that it over exaggerating. It's a whirlwind tour of the college experience, but its a remarkable acheivement for a male writer to capture a female mind so well.
    • 4/5
      This book is about the corruption of a young American girl from Sparta, a remote mountain town in North Carolina, who makes it against all odds to a top university in Pennsylvania ("Dupont"), only to find out that not top-notch education but rather sex, alcohol, drugs and generlly being "cool" are top-most on her fellow students' minds. Tom Wolfe paints a vivid picture of college life on American campuses, or at least that's what he would have us believe, not too successfully in my mind.I guess Wolfe was out to write the definitive book about college life. And indeed the book is nothing but a long (700+ pages) description of the frivolities of college students. It is full of stereotypical characters: the basketball players who get academic discounts and lead a life (literally) above the rest, the drunken frat boys and the giggly sorority girls, the group of smart nerds who are after the Rhodes scholarship and, above all, the innocent hillybilly who cannot believe it all - Charlotte. Wolfe, in his charcteristic style, does not leave much to the imagination when describing Charlotte's encounter with college life. One of ther first experiences on campus are the sounds produced by a boy defecating loudly in the stalls of the co-ed bathroom (I will spare you the details). Shortly thereafter, Charlotte's room-mate throws her out in the middle of the night so that she can spend time there alone with her boyfriend; thus Charlotte learns what it means to be "sexiled". And so on and so forth.Despite its weakness in credibility - I refuse to believe this is what life in Ivy League colleges is all about - what saves this book is Wolfe's excellent writing style, captivating the reader and transporting him to a world that although removed from reality seems at the same time very realistic. I read the book while travelling between three continents and it was a faithful companion on the long flights and sleepless nights. As far as pop fiction goes, it's an entertaining read.One final thought. Wolfe, author of excellent books such as Bonfire of Vanities and A Man in Full, gives thanks in the foreward to the book to his daughters, who apparently let him into the secret lives of college students based on first-hand experiences. If I am Charlotte Simmons faithfully portrays what Wolfe's daughters went through in college, I shudder to think how he reacted, as a father, when hearing their stories.
    • 5/5
      This is an excellent, albeit slightly too subtle work, from a contemporary master.Many of the major critics of the novel seem to cast aspersions at Wolfe's portrayal of the current collegiate zeitgeist. Not surprisingly, they say, this septuagenerian just doesn't "get" today's youth culture and thus his attempt to capture its nuances falls flat. Ah but if only this were the whole story.Wolfe's novel is both descriptive and evaluative. It may be that on the descriptive level he fails (although, as a recent gradate of a prestigious liberal arts college I feel eminently qualified to suggest otherwise) and thus finds himself evaluating caricatures and straw men. But even if we grant that his descriptive effort is exaggerated it seems clear that it isn't an abject failure. Yes, it may be the case that Wolfe is evaluating caricatures, but these caricatures, based as they are on legitimate portraits, are still worth evaluating. At times the novel reads as satire but I took the main thesis to be allegorical. To wit, it seems to me that Charlotte Simmons represents that which is noble, good, and pure about the university and as we watch her unraveling, we can see in it the collapse of the modern university and the moral and epistemological edifice that has long supported it. As the academe has been tempted by the siren songs of fame, fortune, politics, and big time sports so has been Charlotte Simmons in her own more plebeian way. Furthermore, we find that the life of the mind, under the guise of neuroscience, has turned on itself as a way of writing the "mind" (and its lofty pursuits: truth, beauty, justice, and the good) out of existence. It should come then, as no surprise, that couched in the latest Churchlandian neuro-philosophy the mind and its pursuits give way, unapologetically, to animal instinct.
    • 5/5
      He is Back, Better than EverThis book was a long time coming. Tom Wolfe’s battle with depression is over. He is back. And this book is his best.Let there be no doubt. I love reading Tom Wolfe’s books. He is always showing us something we have not quite appreciated. In each book he creates a memorable scene. Who can forget the “out came the dress uniforms” refrain in The Right Stuff; or how about the Masters of the Universe ramping the bond offering in The Bonfire of the Vanities? And then there is Chapter 4 – the visit to the work-out committee – in A Man in Full, one of the funniest chapters I have ever read.This book includes several. There is the f**k and s**t patois, the shared bathroom in the co-ed dorm, the pre-season basketball scrimmage before 10,000 fans, the football tailgate, the fraternity formal and the frat house mixer. That a 74 year-old writer grasps the intricacies and nuances of the college youth culture is a tribute to his talent. While I would love to know the origin of his amicus towards Lacrosse players, there is no question he spans the chasm of generations to capture the college life.This book may have been a long time coming, but here is one reader who prays Wolfe has one or two more books left in him.
    • 4/5
      I found this story about an innocent small town girl's transition to college life very entertaining. Many of Wolfe's characterizations of college students and descriptions of college life were pretty accurate; although, it was kind of hard to believe how naive Charlotte was about pretty much everything. Even so, I would recommend this book and applaud Tom Wolfe's ability to get in the head of a college girl.
    • 4/5
      This was the first Tom Wolfe book that I've read. I was really, really impressed with it. If you can get past the squeamishness you feel when he discusses frat parties and college girls's skipmy attire and anatomy, there is a major social commentary on the American collegian's lifestyle and morals here. It's a bit hard to swallow as a young person, a person who is still so close to being one of those blase, self-indulgent collegians, but I felt that it was such a true picture of what modern college life is like. This is an important book for anyone to read--college student, college graduate or parent of a college-aged kid. Very illuminating.
    • 3/5
      I think if I hadn't been listening to this novel on CD, I never would have finished it. The pace is excruciatingly slow. The story, however, was fairly interesting and compelling -- at least enough that since my reading was passive and occurring while driving, I didn't feel the need to switch it off.What everyone tends to marvel over is how well Tom Wolfe, an old man, writes Charlotte, a young girl. Well, most of those people probably aren't young college girls either. He does a fairly good job of portraying the macro-experience of college life, but he never adequately manages to motivate Charlotte, or explain her reactions.Perhaps the worst thing about his book is the language. I'm no prude, and certainly heard and sometimes used that kind of language on my college campus, but since I was listening to it in my car, I never knew when I was going to be stopped at a light with my windows down, and have a character let out a string of obscenities that made me worry how much the car next to me could hear.I don't think I'd read it again, but neither do I hugely regret having listened to it. Kinda wishy-washy, I know, but that is really the best I can do!
    • 5/5
      What a delicious and enthralling romp. I was utterly sucked into the world of Charlotte Simmons and found this book at turns juicy, hilarious and jaw dropping. I'm thrilled with some of my new vocab words ("soristitute," "sexiled," etc) and though I attended a university wholly unlike Charlotte's, I loved hearing about it all through her eyes. It's definitely a hefty book, but Wolfe's incomparable gifts for dialogue and his keen, cutting observations about class, race, and the desire that each of us has to just, ultimately, fit in kept me hooked.