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77 of 83 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Wolfe - a Southern writer, November 23, 2005
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.
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53 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Fun Read on an Apparently Controversial Subject, November 14, 2004
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.
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87 of 98 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Five for sheer readability, December 1, 2004
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.
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