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.

There's more than a touch of TOOTSIE in stage and film actor Dylan Baker's rendering of the speech pattern of the author's genteel title character, a vulnerable small-town girl from the Blue Ridge Mountains who descends on Dupont University, determined to make her mark. But the aura and the need for status overwhelm her as she is enveloped in the sports-obsessed, sex-pervasive realities of campus life. Wolfe's book runs nearly 700 pages, so an abridgment, even at the length of this one, necessarily eliminates most of the content. Still, a comparison of the book and CD indicates that the excising has been scrupulous, with an eye toward preserving the author's tone and story, as well as the often graphic language. Baker effectively conveys not only the downward spiral of the heroine but also the sliminess of the BMOCs she en-counters. As a bonus, Wolfe offers his perspective in a taped interview. M.J.B. 2005 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

July 1, 2004
Simultaneous with the Farrar hardcover.

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.