Customer Reviews

I Am Charlotte Simmons

5 star:		(180)
4 star:		(162)
3 star:		(122)
2 star:		(83)
1 star:		(98)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Many of the college-age reviewers miss the mark completely. They get hung up on what brand of jeans they wear at their school and what music their "cool" group listens to. They completely lack the perspective to see what Wolfe is getting at - our best and brightest have been surrendered to a system that is anarchy intent only on drugs, sex, and sporting and popular culture.

Some have criticized the amount of play sports are given in the novel. In many colleges, the first and often only thing out of the mouth of many students (if you can find one sober on a Friday night) is the current state of the sports team active at that time of the year. Every year, colleges from Washington and Lee (Wolfe's alma mater and a top-10 party school) to BYU (stone-cold sober top 10) have their current crop of athletes-gone-wild who are cheating in school, raping co-eds, and getting caught driving while on drugs. Wolfe also nails the attitudes and thinking of many athletes and athletic programs. Sure, there are exceptions, but not as many as you think.

And the emphasis on drinking and sex is right on target. I recently attended an Illinois/Michigan football game with a nephew. I crashed in his student apartment and then walked to the game Saturday AM. The streets were littered with used condoms, empty alcohol bottles, half-naked students covered with vomit, and expensive SUV's parked crazily. Being of bookish bent, I swung by the library and found this beautiful facility as quiet as a tombstone - and as empty as the alcohol bottles in the stadium parking lot. Watch some spring break program on TV or rent girls-gone-wild (which I swear I have never done) and you will get the picture.

Wolfe also hits a home-run (See, I told you sports pervades our culture) with his portrayal of pretentious pseudo-intellectuals who posture and pretend that their foul behavior is justified because they are so much better than the rest of the herd. And many of them seek just as hard as the jocks to be drunk, laid, and admired and feared by everyone else. Wolfe enjoys skewering these people. I must admit I enjoy the occasional joust with half-witted Marxist feminists just for kicks myself. (I'll bet you didn't know that Marx viewed females as nothing more than prostitutes. Ask what that means to the next Marxist feminist you encounter and watch them go ballistic. Offer them 10 dollars and watch them really go ballistic.)

The co-ed dorm life is also accurate. 18 year olds are too stupid to see that you really don't want to share bathrooms with the opposite sex. You don't really want to share a bathroom at all, come to think of it. Those of us who are veterans will recall how much fun it was sitting on a row of 10 cut-out plywood holes knee to knee with 10 others during the few minutes between reveille and the time to report. Why any fool would purposely seek such a situation with the opposite sex demonstrates that 18 year olds should have no say whatsoever in their housing arrangements.

Charlotte is not the perfect heroine and lots of her thinking is shallow and selfish, just like all of us at sometime in our younger years. Her sexual encounter is not the point of this book. The point is learning what kind of a world exists in college and compromising with this world and her previous search for a "life of the mind" (as the author puts it).

This book is not for anyone younger than 35 due to the graphic and repetitive language. On second thought, make it 45. This patois of profanity is all too prevalent, even in our junior-high and high schools.

The ending does not really wrap up anything, but is consistent with Wolfe's recent endings. Wolfe leaves to us to supply the ending and meaning of it all. And when you finish reading this book, you may well break out in a sweat when you realize your children have sent their SAT's to all 10 of the top party schools.

In reading "I Am Charlotte Simmons," I started out slowly, but quickly warmed up to the book, staying up until 4am to whiz through the final 100 pages or so. In writing this novel, I don't think Wolfe's prime objective is to present a documentary-style depiction of college life. Instead, utilizing a device Quentin Tarantino uses in his movies, Wolfe exaggerates some characteristics of college life to write a novel about the pressures kids go through as they try to balance their individuality with the social pressures and norms that come with college life.

When an 18-year old kid, such as Charlotte Simmons, begins college, some parts of his or her character are already well defined, while other parts are highly prone to environmental influences. Wolfe employs the arguably over-simplified archetypes of the frat-boy, the nerd, the jock and the snob to emphasize the social stratification of his fictional college campus (one that isn't too far off from reality) and set up the environment through which Charlotte must navigate. Throughout her college journey, Charlotte, through the prism of her naiveté and innocence, is constantly forced to balance her individual beliefs and the morals instilled in her through her upbringing with the new social structure and environment she is forced to confront at the university.

In this book, Wolfe depicts college life for what it is - a bizarre, artificial, highly-stratified mini-civilization that exaggerates many of the characteristics of our society as a whole. Kids are thrown into this environment before many have strongly established their own identities, and their success or failure in this environment depends on their inner-strength and ability to make the right choices.

While everybody at a college campus does not fit neatly into one of the archetypes Wolfe employs in this book (a fact Wolfe himself acknowledges when Charlotte clearly mis-categorizes a girl sitting at her table while in the library), this kind of stratification really does exist at most large schools. And incoming freshman, starting out with a clean slate, are constantly bombarded with choices - whether to join a fraternity/sorority, who to hang out with (and the social implications of choosing to hang out with particular people or groups), whether to drink, how much to study, where to party, what classes to take, etc. Wolfe pretty accurately depicts the emotions that a person goes through as they navigate these decisions. Tellingly, many of the people Charlotte interacts with are already seniors, and they have made their choices long ago (though they are certainly capable of changing their minds). Charlotte is only just starting to figure things out, and we follow her through a series of steps and missteps, sharing her emotions along the way. Starting out with an idealist view of college life, Charlotte is quickly hit by cold reality, makes some startlingly bad (but understandable) decisions, and ends up at least understanding the system through which she must navigate.

Ultimately, this is a book is both a depressing commentary on society and a hopeful work about the importance of making good choices. At heart, we are a society obsessed with looks, image and social status, and that getting ahead is exceedingly difficult without inherent advantages in at least one of these areas. But Wolfe moderates this somewhat depressing portrayal of society by showing that individuals have a lot of power over their own lives through the choices they make. Those who choose to let good people and good influences into their lives feed off their strength, and can attain happiness and overcome a social system that too often rewards narcissism and encourages hedonism. Those who make poor choices and allow bad people into their lives are doomed to betrayal and unhappiness, no matter where they start out in life. At the end of the book, we're not really sure that Charlotte herself has made all the right choices, but we can see that she is a good person, and that those who choose to have her in their lives are making a good choice themselves.

I am a big Tom Wolfe fan, but all the reviews statingthat the books was only about out of control college kids screwing like rabbits almost convinced me to skip this one. Like most great novels the reader can chose how deeply or superficially to puruse the book. One can read it simply as a page turner. Wolfe offers much more. He investigated elite colleges first hand before writing the book. Thus the reader gets social cultural descriptions of 'our best', our pre-ordained 'masters of the universe'. Wolfe is hilarious in exposing the values and behaviors of the sorority sisters and the frats. In fact there are too many memorable scenes to mention. Wolfe turns race relations upside down, examines big time college athletes, or student-athletes, economic and social class, and university culture. The book raises many questions, and gives the reader a lot to think about. Most negative reviewers seem to take this book personally. Some get hung up on Charlotte's virginity which is really a character issue or choice. The book is about human beings, it has universal meanings and themes that are important to think about. The writing is, well its Tom Wolfe. If you want to read a book that will become a classic and still be around 50 years from now, from our national treasure, Tom Wolfe, our Mark Twain and Dickens, read, really read the book. If all you want to do is focus on reporting of sexual mores you can do that as well. If you really get upset that a female character choses sexual abstanance then you may agree with the professional reviewers. If you are stringently politically correct and can't take critques of 'sacred cows' then this book may upset you.

I cannot understand the contempt evident in so many of these reviews of what is ultimately a compelling and engrossing novel. Wolfe is one of the best in our time, and has the raw talent to be a peer to Dickens or Twain, if not the dilligence or the patience (that is, with his writing; he is the most thorough and penetrating observer of American culture today, and perhaps since Touqueville. The blunt and heavy-handed prose, overlong expositions, plain descriptions, ocassional bad gramatical choices, and underdrawn characters (this is not an attempt at irony) should be taken in context as minor flaws in an excellent novel, flaws which if corrected could have easily transformed this into a great novel.

The bulk of these reviewers miss the point of the book entirely. This is much deeper than a mere expression of shock at collegiate decadence. It is an examination of what motivates human action, applied most intensively towards his female characters, which Wolfe had neglected in his previous novels. (I defy anybody to give me one specific detail in which he totally missed the mark as far as feminine psychology goes.) I guess these reviewers figured Wolfe's visitations of Charlotte's neuropsychology class to be purposeless, as his references to Bovary, and his prolouge.

What Wolfe is actually doing is investigating the impulses, visceral, brutish and bestial, embedded in the human race, to dominate, to reproduce, to belong, and investigating into how these impulses shape and interact with the societies in which we live. He draws a ray of hope that something can transcend these carnal instincts to produce something resembling a human society; but that ray starts off thin and in the end diminishes further. It is the human soul, or at least the idea that we have one, and Wolfe's point is that the university, through its campus culture and its academics, works to destroy that soul.

The shapers of modern academia thought that by abolishing such arbitrary customs as sleeping at night, seperate bathrooms for male and female students, formal attire, and all other sorts of order, they were breaking archaic barriers and allowing their students to live an autonomous life free of irrational social constraints. They neglected to account for the fact that no human being is autonomous. The slate is never clean; each and every one of us comes into the world loaded with baggage, full of primordial instincts and drives which, if left unchecked, could overcome our ego and transform us into animals. By flushing out all order, all notions of truth, life, right, and wrong, and leaving people to create themselves what happens is that they are stripped of all cultural defenses against their most crude and barbaric impulses and only those with the greatest moral strength (Wolfe vividly projects the distinction between spiritual strength, physical power, and intellect), can retain their very humanity, their individual/social identity. And the book passes the most important test of a novel in that we care deeply, even if only in spite of ourselves about the fate of its protagonist.

To paraphrase Michael Barone, our society creates the most inept 18 year-olds and the most super competent 30 year-olds in the world. Tom Wolfe shows us in I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS how incompetent the 18 year olds of today are, in the setting of a prestigious University full of the best and brightest. His third novel should worry parents and enlighten the rest of us.

Those familiar with Wolfe's style of new journalism will appreciate how he uses a combination of subtlety and action to reveal character traits and feelings. Wolfe's characters are funny because they are mostly charlatans, egomaniacs or self-righteous bores. This novel and his last both introduce sympathetic characters and he puts them into a society that doesn't understand their inherent goodness. Wolfe makes his heroes re-think their own values in a world that would just as soon stomp on them.

Charlotte has been given the immense gift of fleeing her poor rural life and living amongst contemporary geniuses. What she assumes will be discussion groups on philosophy and science is, in fact, a campus of frat parties and hooking up. She's isolated and clings to her own small town values, but as her loneliness grows deeper, she compromises little things and later bigger things to better fit in. Wolfe gives us 700 pages to watch Charlotte's strength get sapped by the unforgiving realities of contemporary life.

Along the way we meet jocks, geeks, frat boys, sorority girls, genius professors and radical hippy ones. We meet college coaches and rich parents and famous politicians and very few of them come off looking noble. Wolfe can be salacious when he describes the goings on and it's a big plus for the book, because we can enjoy the description and later feel morally superior to the acts themselves. It's not too unlike how Cecil B. DeMille created biblical epics to get away with all kinds of lasciviousness.

This is an unforgiving look at how modern colleges have adopted ancient Greek Bacchus like behavior, while ignoring the virtuous Socratic philosophy. Some writers may have used this material to endlessly moralize, but Wolfe seems more like one of those ancient Greek Gods laughing from Mount Olympus.

This is not a book for your Sunday school group, or for anyone who wants to hold on to their misconceptions about what college is really about. It is offensive (at times) both in language and subject matter, revealing the author's depth of research and preparation for this novel.

As a high school teacher, I have seen many "Charlottes"; those who are weary with jocks and party-people and want to find a truly intellectual "life of the mind." They leave my classroom believing that their freshman year of college will be just that - a new frontier filled with others like themselves: those who long to change the world simply through the power of thought. What they discover is much what Charlotte herself discovers: their secluded small town really was a microcosm, and all of the issues that existed there exist at their university, only now they are better-funded.

It's been amusing to read the reviews and notice that you can almost identify which *Charlotte* crowd the reviewer fits into. Most of the angry ones would be *Adams* in my opinion, furiously claiming that Wolfe got it wrong and that not all college students are like these. They miss the point. They are angry about the ending; about Charlotte giving up her pursuit of a "life of the mind." Once again, they miss the point.

In finding Jojo, Charlotte discovers her happy medium. He is tired of pretending to be stupid, and she is tired of pretending to be something she is not. They are a match, and Charlotte Simmons finds that she is (maybe) more Sparta than she would ever have cared to admit, and she shares much with the community of parents and friends that she left behind. She discovers that you don't go somewhere to find a "life of the mind"; you find it within yourself, in the choices that you make every day. All others are falsehoods.

After finishing the book, I felt as if I was Charlotte Simmons, only with slightly modified choices. Wolfe's novel made me evaluate my own life and feel more at peace with the life I have created. If *Charlotte* had an epilogue, I am sure that it would tell us that she did the same.

"Unrealistic!", cry the adults reviewing this novel. They claim that college life simply isn't as Wolfe portrays it; that somewhere he's gone awry, and his depiction of hormonally crazed teenagers is way off the mark.

Friendships are easy to make in college, they write. And no college is as driven by athletics and the party scene as Wolfe's Dupont.

I have to ask--were you educated in Sparta, right along with Charlotte?

As a college freshman, just like Charlotte, in a school eerily similar to Dupont, I found the novel strikingly accurate. Disregarding all character / plot criticisms, I had to give the book 4 stars simply for its dead-on portrayal of college life today.

Some--not all, but some--fraternity formals are exactly like Wolfe's. The living situation is the same--if you're stuck with a terrible roommate, she may 'sexile' you on a regular basis. It happens. And to whomever claimed college freshman don't listen to Britney Spears, I invite you to my hall for a day. You'll soon change your mind.

It is important to note that Wolfe's description here is not meant to be a generalization. It is not meant to encompass all aspects of college life, nor is it meant to characterize all fraternities, all college students. Wolfe sets out to portray a certain side of collegiates today, and he does so with alarming accuracy. Of course there are exceptions to the rule. Of course there are girls confident in their sexuality; of course there are intellectuals who avoid being swept up in the sex-crazed atmosphere. But just as there are exceptions, there are cases that fit the mold. There are girls who sacrifice their morals in order to fit in: after all, your friendships freshman year are largely determined by your living situation. If you're surrounded by people who are involved in the Greek life, you'll consider that a larger aspect of the college culture than it may be.

And--just to clear the record--a collegiate-age virgin is not unusual. Yes, teens are having sex earlier and earlier. But teens are also waiting. Stop generalizing and allow room in your mind for changes of opinions.

Wolfe does not aim to generalize college life. He aims to portray a side of it--that's all. One side, to which there are exceptions, just as with everything else. Keep this in mind, and you'll be awed by his cross-generational knowledge.