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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.
Wolfe is, as always, a master of language. He shows off "dazzling" prose theatrics (Washington Post) throughout Charlotte Simmons, faithfully replicating the sounds of basketball players mid-action and drunken students mid-coitus. Several set pieces are also extremely powerful. But Wolfes words won over only a few critics (in fact, some were nauseated by his countless exclamation points). The problem is that the college experience is nothing new. Unlike his books about high-stakes bond trading (Bonfire of the Vanities) or astronauts preparing for flight (The Right Stuff), this book is
unsurprising. And, according to some critics, its also sexist, out of touch, and incredibly cliché.One of the biggest weaknesses is his central character, Charlotte, the authors first female protagonist. Shes completely unbelievable. Who could be this smart yet so dangerously clueless? It doesnt add up. In fact, no matter whom you ask, Wolfe makes outlandish mistakes here. Perhaps it can be blamed on his research. Would any student reveal the complete truth to the well-dressed man in his 70s standing in the corner of a fraternity bacchanal?
A very few critics hint at a deeper, darker message about the current sexual climate lingering beneath his "two-backed beasts herkyjerky humping bang bang bang" (see the Sex on Campus sidebar). Though the overall critical score is low, it should be noted that several reviewers found the book highly readablealmost addictiveeven if it has no obvious deep insight to impart.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Wall Street trading floors to outer space, no setting is safe from Wolfe's satirical clutches. In his latest weighty offering (2.5 pounds, to be exact), the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff takes on the world of academe. Charlotte Simmons is a brilliant, beautiful, and impossibly naive freshman at prestigious Dupont University. With its Gothic spires and manicured lawns, idyllic Dupont is clearly the stuff of fiction, boasting a championship basketball team, a litany of Nobel laureates, and an unbelievably bawdy student body. Hailing from the North Carolina backwoods town of Sparta, Charlotte is one in a cast of predictable collegiate characters (the dumb jock, the snooty preppy, the oversexed frat guy, and the undersexed nerd), but in Wolfe's capable hands, the stereotypes are rendered in Dolby Surround Sound. (His research at such higher-ed bastions as Stanford and Michigan has paid off.) Wolfe gleefully displays his knowledge of college lingo: "sexiled" (banished by a dorm roommate intent on bedding a beau), "Monet" (a woman who looks better from a distance than close up), and the ranking system of withering repartee, "Sarc 1" to "Sarc 4." Fans will revel in Wolfe's trademark polysyllabically perverse prose, but they may be surprised by the moral outrage he expresses over the transgressions of today's youth. Finally, Wolfe remains a carnivorous social critic, but Charlotte Simmons is more savagery than substance. He can do better. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Our pre-eminent social realist...trains his all-seeing eye on the institution of the American university. . . . Wolfe's rhapsodic prose style finds its perfect target in academia's beer-soaked bacchanals.” ―Henry Alford, Newsday
“Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era. . . . A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel.” ―Lev Grossman, Time
“Tom Wolfe has scored a slam dunk with his...attention to style, the rule-bending punctuation, the deftness of slang dialogue, and that biting satire.” ―Steve Garbarino, New York Post
“Wolfe's dialogue is some of the finest in literature, not just fast but deep. He hears the cacophony of our modern lives.” ―Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
“[A] hilarious, exclamation-point filled novel.” ―John Freeman, Time Out New York
“Brilliant . . . I couldn't stop reading it. . . . Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure.” ―Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“A lot of fun . . . Hilarious.” ―Francine Prose, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Tom Wolfe remains a peerless satirist. Alone among our fiction writers he is actively writing the human comedy, American-style, on a grand Dickensian scale.” ―David Lehman, Bloomberg News
“Scathingly clear-eyed, often very funny take on college life.” ―Robert Siegel, NPR, All Things Considered
“Dazzingly vivid . . . Tom Wolfe has served up another of his broadly entertaining novels.” ―Adam Begley, The New York Observer
“His most fully realized and hands-down funniest work of fiction.” ―Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman
“Captivating . . . Sit back and enjoy the ride.” ―Tom Walker, The Denver Post
“Tom Wolfe is America's greatest living novelist.” ―Joseph Bottum, The Weekly Standard
“Rollicking . . . Just as Americans continue to read A Farewell to Arms or The Great Gatsby, we'll be reading I Am Charlotte Simmons for many years. . . . Professors like to complain that they get a year older every fall, while students always remain the same. Add I Am Charlotte Simmons to that magic circle of campus phenomena unlikely to age.” ―Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer
About the Author
Tom Wolfe is one of the founders of the new journalism movement and author of 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.
From The Washington Post
According to Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, modern collegiate life revolves around "hooking up," regularly glorifies louts and tarts, and instead of civilized discourse promulgates a culture based on the fear of humiliation. At fictional Dupont University, every guy wants to be thought a "player" (or, as Wolfe spells it, "playa"), and nearly all the undergraduate women hope to be no better than sluts. Behind those ivied walls, our daughters gladly squirm out of their low-cut jeans to rut with shameless abandon, while our sons treat their one-night stands as conquests and whores. In such a world, most speech naturally aspires to the condition of grunted obscenities, and any conversation soon becomes a verbal combat, an attempt to cow and intimidate a rival, whether on the basketball court or in the quad. Social status, based on prowess (sexual and athletic), is naturally everything, so in nearly 700 pages we need hardly glimpse the inside of a classroom. In Wolfe's bleak vision, Dupont -- likened in prestige to Harvard, Princeton and Duke -- is simply a brothel attached to a sports arena. It doesn't educate our children, it corrupts them.For more than 40 years, the magnificently gifted Wolfe has shown us that he can draw with ease on every resource of English prose and then push hard against all the limits, whether of diction, point of view or conventional taste, and still make us marvel at the result. In this new novel, set largely among Dupont undergraduates, he replicates the speech of black basketball players, spoiled preppies, aging radicals, college administrators and Southern hill people. He shows us contemporary academia with all the passionate, naturalistic detail of a Zola depicting the workers and workings of a coal mine. Yet Wolfe's narrative momentum never flags, as he carries one rapidly along to the grim conclusion he hints at, rather too obviously, in a brief foreword.
Ostensibly a passage from a biographical dictionary, this foreword describes a young psychologist's experiments with cats. After Victor Starling removes the amygdala from the brains of some test animals, the cats "veer helplessly from one inappropriate affect to another, boredom where there should be fear, cringing where there should be preening, sexual arousal where there was nothing that would stimulate an intact animal." After weeks of observing these animals, Starling invites a colleague into his lab, and one cat suddenly starts to thrust violently, sexually, against this newcomer's leather shoe. Just what one would expect -- until the visitor points out that the cat trying to mount his wingtip is one of the normal control animals. At this juncture, the biographical note informs us, Victor Starling makes the discovery that ultimately earns him a Nobel Prize:
"The control cats had been able to watch the amygdalectomized cats from their cages. Over a period of weeks they had become so thoroughly steeped in an environment of hypermanic sexual obsession that behavior induced surgically in the amygdalectomized cats had been induced in the controls without any intervention whatsoever. Starling had discovered that a strong social, or 'cultural' atmosphere, even as abnormal as this one, could in time overwhelm the genetically determined responses of perfectly, normal healthy animals." And so, when 18-year-old Charlotte Simmons, a brilliant, hard-working student from a poor North Carolina backwoods town, arrives at prestigious Dupont University and there discovers not a Platonic academy but a sink of licentiousness, hypocrisy and vulgarity, we already know -- at least in rough outline -- her fate. For how can pretty Charlotte, no matter how strong her sense of self and no matter how deeply instilled her traditional Christian values, withstand the pressure to turn herself into a clone of Britney Spears -- and then to forget her mighty intellectual ambitions and simply give herself, mind and body, to some hot fraternity dude or basketball superstar?
Throughout I Am Charlotte Simmons the writing is quite dazzling, as one expects from the author of The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities. There are brilliant, almost too obviously brilliant, set pieces (the chapter describing the Saint Ray fraternity "formal" in Washington, D.C., is a relentlessly graphic bacchanal cum dance of death). Every page displays a master of rhetoric, working every trope in the trivium. But is this an honest portrait of contemporary undergraduate life?
I don't think so. And not because of its focus on sex, social status and the dread of being dissed as central to the life of the university. Such hormonal and pecking-order obsessions have been with us as long as teenagers, even if Wolfe treats late adolescence as largely a crime against humanity. Frat boys have often been drunken, exploitative jerks. Lots of college athletes are dolts. Young women do enjoy sex as much as young men. What bothers me is that Wolfe stacks the cards so strongly against these quite ordinary kids, shows them as depraved, callused against all generosity of heart, essentially monstrous. Aside from Charlotte Simmons, there are virtually no admirable or lovable characters in this book. And I couldn't really believe in Charlotte.
Could any young woman with 1600 SATs be quite so ignorant of American life? We are to imagine that Charlotte Simmons has never seen Cosmopolitan magazine before she arrives at Dupont. But she's read Zola's La Bête Humaine -- both in English and in French. She's never drunk alcohol or heard girls talk dirty or imagined that her roommate might actually want to be alone with a boy on Saturday night. Don't they have television in North Carolina? She's shocked that at the university "everything you say has to be ironic or sarcastic and cynical and sophisticated and sick, virulent, covered in pustules, and oozing with popped-pustular sex." (Hello, talked to any teens lately?) When a boy dares to "paw" her a little, she calls him a "cad," then later grows convinced that the most panty-obsessed stud on campus must be truly in love with her. When he invites her on an overnight trip, it apparently never crosses smarty Charlotte's mind where she'll be sleeping. Our heroine acts, in other words, like Goody Two-Shoes, while going on and on about how "I am Charlotte Simmons" and that no one can bend her will. Yet Wolfe makes it increasingly clear that at heart his lonely freshman only wants to have a cute boyfriend to flaunt in front of the cool girls. "What academic achievement, what soaring flight of genius, even a Nobel Prize in neuroscience, could ever be as important?"
In other words, Charlotte can be either Charlotte Simmons or she can be . . . somebody's hot little cupcake. Essentially, she can't possibly be a good person, good in the classroom, and good in bed. If she loses her virginity or gets drunk one weekend, these must inexorably lead to mental breakdown and the ruin of her academic career. This is patently unrealistic and sexist, not to add distinctly archaic.
Dupont University itself struck me as equally improbable: No university of its eminence could be quite so thoroughly yahoo. At the very least, the place should be teeming with ruthlessly ambitious business majors and bleary-eyed pre-med students. There might be sex and drugs on Friday night and Saturday morning, but during the week these academic hotshots would be vying like mad to outdo each other in their courses. Our Charlotte, who possesses an "absolutely clear, open, guileless beauty" -- a phrase that practically announces her future degradation -- as well as rare intellectual diligence and sensitivity, should have been a campus star just by remaining herself, with a choice of handsome beaux. Instead she's suddenly on the verge of moral destruction.
For Wolfe's university resembles Dante's Malebolge, a cesspool of filth, and nearly everyone who comes in contact with it is defiled. Or could Dupont be simply a reflection of a pervasive spiritual aridity and baseness throughout all America? Even Charlotte's one male friend, a nerdy intellectual kid named Adam Gellin, daydreams of lording it as an "aristo-meritocrat," a public intellectual living well off the "empire." The only exceptions to the general corruption are Charlotte's family -- and they are portrayed as God-fearing, salt-of-the-earth hicks. (Wolfe writes a cringe-inducing chapter in which Mr. and Mrs. Simmons invite a wealthy New England couple -- the parents of Charlotte's roommate -- to dine at a Sizzlin' Skillet.) Admittedly, one basketball star may be partially redeemed by a desire to actually learn something in his classes, yet why that impulse -- and the love of a good woman -- should suddenly imbue him with wizardry on the court is little more than the stuff of fairy tale.
Or sermon. Once Tom Wolfe might have been called a satirist (The Pump House Gang) or a pamphleteer (The Painted Word), duly calling attention, wittily and scathingly, to the evils of the day. But like Savonarola, who set up the original bonfire of the vanities, he has grown into an unremitting scold, excoriating perceived depravity with all his genius for replicating the various argots of American life. I Am Charlotte Simmons leaves no doubt that Wolfe's prose can still venture anywhere, from the ghetto to the girl's restroom. But the book remains a (slightly disguised) hellfire tirade, a vision of students who belong in the hands of an angry God. And that God is named Tom Wolfe.
Wolfe himself would like to be compared to the great realistic masters -- Dickens or Balzac -- but this latest work more often calls to mind Zola, Frank Norris and other powerful melodramatists of fiction. As so-called naturalists, they revel in zealous description, generally of life's meanest aspects, while their titanic plots turn the ostensibly ordinary into the operatically over-the-top. (Just so, a major subplot in I Am Charlotte Simmons involves the fallout from two drunken fraternity brethren observing a future presidential candidate receiving fellatio from a Dupont co-ed.) Throughout these pages one might almost hear Tom Wolfe shouting "J'Accuse," as he piles on the outrage and contempt. However, at the end of the book, we realize that its secret model isn't only Victor Starling's cat experiment (itself an homage, perhaps, to Zola's attempt to base his novels on the biological theories of Claude Bernard). I Am Charlotte Simmons is also Tom Wolfe's 1984, the story of how a man -- or woman -- may come to acquiesce in spiritual suicide. Compare the similar ironies in the last pages of each novel.
So: sermon, melodrama, dystopian vision -- I Am Charlotte Simmons partakes of all these, and does so stunningly. But it's still as much polemic as novel. One closes the book feeling soiled by its cloacal vision and emotionally manipulated by its author. Rhetoric -- the art of persuasion -- lies at the heart of all writing, but we dislike feeling too overtly manipulated, and works that blatantly force our emotions along precise paths we dub inartistic, mere propaganda or programmatic writing with a social or political agenda. I Am Charlotte Simmons is such a work. I couldn't stop reading it -- who could? This is Tom Wolfe, after all -- but that didn't prevent me from regarding the author's premise, characters and views as hardly more than an ill-tempered, Mrs. Grundy-like rant against reckless youth and this immoral modern age. Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure before his arias of coloratura description, he can do just about anything in these pages with words, including exaggerate, distort and rant.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
