I Am Charlotte Simmons

November 8, 2004
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.

July 1, 2004
Starry-eyed Charlotte learns that college life in the new millennium is not about learning but about sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll.

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2004
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. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)