I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel [Paperback]

Tom Wolfe (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 11, 2005

Tom Wolfe, the master social novelist of our time, the spot-on chronicler of all things contemporary and cultural, presents a sensational new novel about life, love, and learning--or the lack of it--amid today's American colleges.

Our story unfolds at fictional Dupont University: those Olympian halls of scholarship 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. 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.

As Charlotte encounters the paragons of Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a 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 Turk 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 is seduced by the heady glamour of acceptance, betraying both her values and upbringing before she grasps the power of being different--and the exotic allure of her own innocence.

With his trademark satirical wit and famously sharp eye for telling detail, Wolfe draws on extensive observations at campuses across the country to immortalize the early-21st-century college-going experience.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon.com Exclusive Content

Product Description: 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. 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 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 Turk 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.

Tom Wolfe Talks About I Am Charlotte Simmons
In I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe masterfully chronicles college sports, fraternities, keggers, coeds, and sex--all through the eyes of the titular Simmons, a bright and beautiful freshman at the fictional Dupont University. Listen to an Amazon.com exclusive audio clip of Wolfe talking about his new novel.

Listen to Tom Wolfe Talk About I Am Charlotte Simmons

Tom Wolfe Timeline

1931: Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr. born in Richmond, VA, on March 2. Wolfe later attends Washington and Lee University (BA, English, 1951), and Yale University (Ph.D., American Studies, 1957).

1956: Wolfe begins working as a reporter in Springfield, MA, Washington, D.C., then finally New York City, writing feature articles for major newspapers, as well as New York and Esquire magazines. Not satisfied with the conventions of newspaper reporting at the time, Wolfe experiments with using the techniques of fiction writing in his news articles. Wolfe's newspaper career spans a decade.

1963: After being sent by Esquire to research a story about the custom car world in Southern California, Wolfe returns to New York with ideas, but no article. Upon telling his editor he cannot write it, the editor suggests he send his notes and someone else will. Wolfe stays up all night, types 49 pages, and turns it in the next morning. Later that day, the editor calls to tell Wolfe they are cutting the salutation off the top of the memorandum, printing the rest as-is. Thus, New Journalism was arguably born, whereby writing and storytelling techniques previously utilized only in fiction were radically applied to nonfiction. Straight reporting pieces now were free to include: the author's perceptions and experience, shifting perspectives, the use of jargon and slang, the reconstruction of events and conversations.

1965: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux publish Wolfe's first collection of nonfiction stories displaying his newfound reporting techniques: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The book cements Wolfe's place as a prominent stylist of the New Journalism movement.

1968: The Pump House Gang and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (No. 91 on National Review's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century) publish on the same day, and together provide an up-close portrait and exploration of the hippie culture of the 1960s (by following the novelist Ken Kesey and his entourage of LSD enthusiasts), and the cultural change occurring at a seminal point in U.S. social history.

1970: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is published. This collection underscores racial divide in America, including an am using story about the socialites of New York City seeking out black liberation groups as guests, focusing on the conductor Leonard Bernstein's party with the Black Panthers in attendance at his Park Avenue duplex. (No. 35 on National Review's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century .)

1976: Wolfe labels the 1970s "The Me Decade" in his collection of essays, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. Wolfe illustrates the bookthroughout.

1979: The Right Stuff is published. Depicting the status, structure, exploits, and ethics of daredevil pilots at the forefront of rocket and aircraft technology, as well as the beginnings of the space program and the pioneering NASA astronauts who were the first Americans to land on the moon, the book receives the National Book Award in 1980. An Academy Award-winning film is made from the book in 1983.

1987: With publication of his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities--serialized in Rolling Stone magazine--Wolfe pens one of the bestselling and definitive novels of the 1980s, continuing his social criticism and ability to capture the lives and preoccupations of Americans, one generation at a time. Wolfe receives a record $5 million for movie rights to the novel and, despite the success of the book, the film fails at the box office.

1998: A Man in Full, Wolfe's second novel, is published to mixed criticism, yet garners favor as a 1998 National Book Award Finalist. Here, Wolfe aims his sights on the Atlanta, GA, elite, trophy wives, and real estate developers, continuing to comment on racial issues and the chasm in socioeconomic status in America.

2000: Hooking Up, a collection of essays, reviews, profiles, and the novella, Ambush at Fort Bragg, is published.

2004: On November 9, Wolfe's third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, set at the fictional Dupont University, is published. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

What New York City finance was to Wolfe in the 1980s and Southern real estate in the '90s, the college campus is in this sprawling, lurid novel: a flashpoint for cultural standards and the setting for a modern parable. At elite Dupont (a fictional school based on Wolfe's research at places like Stanford and Michigan), the author unspools a standard college story with a 21st-century twist—jocks, geeks, prudes and partiers are up to their usual exploits, only now with looser sexual mores and with the aid of cell phones. Wolfe begins, as he might say, with a "bango": two frat boys tangle with the bodyguard of a politician they've caught in a sex act. We then race through plots involving students' candy-colored interactions with each other and inside their own heads: Charlotte, a cipher and prodigy from a conservative Southern family whose initiation into dorm life Wolfe milks to much dramatic advantage; Jojo, a white basketball player struggling with race, academic guilt and job security; Hoyt, a BMOC frat boy with rage issues; Adam, a student reporter cowed by alpha males. As in Wolfe's other novels, characters typically fall into two categories: superior types felled by their own vanity and underdogs forced to rely on wiles. But what in Bonfire of the Vanities were powerful competing archetypes playing out cultural battles here seem simply thin and binary types. Wolfe's promising setup never leads to a deeper contemplation of race, sex or general hierarchies. Instead, there is a virtual recitation of facts, albeit colorful ones, with little social insight beyond the broadly obvious. (Athletes getting a free pass? The sheltered receiving rude awakenings?) Boasting casual sex and machismo-fueled violence, the novel seems intent on shocking, but little here will surprise even those well past their term-paper years. Wolfe's adrenalized prose remains on display—e.g., a basketball game seen from inside a player's head—and he weaves a story that comes alive with cinematic vividness. But, like a particular kind of survey course, readers are likely to breeze through these pages—yet find themselves with little to show for it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 752 pages
• Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition (August 11, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312424442
• ISBN-13: 978-0312424442
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (661 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #147,407 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tom Wolfe is 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 B.A. at Washington and Lee University and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lives in New York City.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 99 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Fun Read on an Apparently Controversial Subject November 14, 2004

By M. Goldner

Format:Hardcover

Poor Tom Wolfe. He writes infrequently, and readers apparently bring a lot of baggage to his work, based on the reviews above and on the universality of the subject he covers here.

Whether or not you feel like Wolfe accurately captures college life in the 21st century, one thing is for sure: Wolfe writes with more flair and color than any of his contemporaries. Like his other work, I Am Charlotte Simmons is engrossing, very funny at times and a real page turner. Certainly I found a lot here that reminded me of my college days, and Wolfe does a great job of capturing the different elements of campus life, elements that largely transcend the specific jargon and events of any specific decade.

Whereas I was highly disappointed with the end of A Man In Full (although I loved the rest of the book), I Am Charlotte Simmons has a truer, better conclusion, and is well worth the investment. If you're a fan of Tom Wolfe, you won't be disappointed. If you're not a fan of Tom Wolfe, and you like to read, you need to check him out. I'd probably start with The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities, but basically you can't go wrong.

I Am Charlotte Simmons is a welcome addition to the Wolfe canon, and don't let the negative reviews here sway you; as someone else has noted, even bad Wolfe is better than 99% of everything else out there.

128 of 142 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Wolfe - a Southern writer November 23, 2005

By Daniel Berger VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Tom Wolfe's subject matter here - college life - is thinner than in some of his other books. But his powers of perception are undiminished, and he still delivers satire with the best of them.

Wolfe, who is proud of the amount of research he does, is known to have visited numerous campuses in his years of work on this book. In one interview he recounted fleeing a frat party with its participants out the back door as the police raided it. Now, that's research! So I assume his characters here are reasonably true to life.

And what he finds is this: That despite drastic cultural changes, some aspects of college life persist because they are so firmly rooted in unchangeable human behavior. Jocks and other BMOCs (big men on campus) rule because they are the alpha males that the girls want. It's biology. The girls can't help themselves from wanting them, even less so in today's amoral climate where women are free to do whatever they want in college.

Wolfe delivers the expected campus satire. (Actually, it hews so close to reality it may be unfair to call it "satire.") The bullying coach has his own power base and million-dollar advertising deals, and ridicules any player who actually wants to get an education. The angry Asian feminist intellectual perceives any heard remark as an insult against some victim group, to which she responds with a foul-mouthed gusto her male companions can only dream of matching. The aging radical professor still wages war against jocks and fascists. The sorority girls are slutty and drunken snobs totally preoccupied with status, parties and clothes. The frat boys are drunken morons preoccupied with sex, parties and sports. And so on.

What many critics fail to perceive about Wolfe, though, is that he is essentially a Southern writer. His Southern roots have always shown in his writing. His greatest theme throughout, from his early days writing magazine stories about stock car racer Junior Johnson, through "The Right Stuff", "A Man in Full" and now "I Am Charlotte Simmons", is the Southern conception of manhood and its collision with or elaboration in modern life.

Our main character here gives Wolfe entrée to examine the values, some particular to women, Charlotte Simmons brings from small town to big college, from South to North. Cute enough and exceedingly smart, she is nonetheless an innocent thrust into a big, bad world - a timeless fiction theme.

But much of the book concerns the young men whose paths cross Charlotte's on campus. Wolfe draws them as inescapably facing rules of manhood implicit in the Southern outlook. They are measured substantially by how they stand up to physical challenges, athletic or violent or both. Jo-Jo the star basketball player is showered in glory and girls, then finds his interest in actual learning inspired. Frat boy Hoyt becomes legendary in campus life by acquitting himself well in a brawl with a governor's bodyguard, but secretly dreads the day he graduates with a poor transcript to dim prospects in the real world, where campus cool won't count. Adam the brilliant nerd must work two humiliating jobs to stay in school; he lacks the courage to stand up to stronger boys and leads a sexless existence, which readers may infer are connected. Charlotte is not immune to these factors, despite her best intentions. Is it because she is a traditional woman, or despite being a modern one?

Some plot elements are shaky. Wolfe's frat-heavy, sports-obsessed campus would be more convincing as a big state school in the South; it is less so as an elite Northern school mentioned in the same breath with Harvard and Yale. Students who average 1490 on their SATs, as Dupont's do, are unlikely to devolve as completely as those around Charlotte seem to. However, the author needs the Northern milieu to increase the complete isolation that precipitates Charlotte's personal crisis; in the South she would find others like herself, and would not expose herself to ridicule every time she lets slip her twanging drawl. Charlotte's isolation, even given the Northern locale, isn't entirely plausible; Wolfe must contrive a break between her and a couple of not-the-in-crowd-either friends, who more realistically would probably be drawn to have been there for her, to offer some solace. Some readers may find Charlotte more innocent than likely in today's world, but I disagree: a poor, remote hometown combined with a religious family, lack of dating experience and few friends might easily produce a Charlotte Simmons, even now.

Wolfe resolves things reasonably well. Without giving away too much, though, I find his ending for Charlotte incomplete. We learn how she winds up socially. But we never learn whether a brilliant young student recovers her academic mojo after it is damaged by personal issues her first term. It seems unlikely that she wouldn't, but Wolfe never spells it out and at one point hints otherwise. A woman may find fulfillment inspiring a man to become a better one, as Charlotte ends up doing and as women have timelessly done - something modern society forgets to its detriment. Women might want to contemplate whether the "sensitive-male" stereotype modern society encourages, is actually a man women themselves find attractive.

It is implausible, though, that Charlotte could be happy so completely and quickly abandoning the part of herself that most defines herself - her mind. These ruminations aside, this is still a fine book and worth the time.

111 of 125 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Five for sheer readability December 1, 2004

By Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader

Format:Hardcover

Flawed, yes, and perhaps not entirely convincing, "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is nonetheless an engrossing read with enough appealing characters, surprising turns of event, and occasional tart moments to keep your nose in the book for a good long while. Okay so it's not "Bonfire of the Vanities"-what is? This book goes down very easy, but take a minute to think about what goes on at Dupont University and you'll probably find "Charlotte" is a pretty disturbing book.

You have to like Charlotte Simmons. Here she is, a girl from a rural high school, the success, the striver. With her grades, scores, and drive, she gets into all the top colleges in the country but chooses Dupont, the place she feels she will find her intellectual equals. This is not what Charlotte finds.

The most moving character is basketball player Jojo Johanssen, another kid from a hardscrabble background who finds himself in hot water when he actually begins to like learning. The downside of this is that because Jojo has been playing top basketball since high school, he hasn't had much education since middle school. So, should he continue to take soft jock-friendly classes and pass, or risk his scholarship and athletic future by signing up for the philosophy classes he craves and failing?

The goings-on at Dupont are all pretty tawdry, revolving entirely around sex and drinking. Charlotte wonders why people with combined SAT scores of 1550 can act this way. The arrogance and lack of common decency among the students is so overwhelming that some of the scenes are difficult to read. After four years at this school, what kind of person will she be?

For entertainment, this novel is worth reading, as it is for the questions it poses about the people we will be turning the world over to. I recommend it for both reasons.