
His commentary makes the foolish characters somewhat coherent to the non-college student and provides some insight into the reasons for this dismal state of affairs. Wolfe combines the bland, vulgar statements of the characters with his own witty and enlightening additions. If one can bear the vulgarity and decadence, one will be treated to superb story telling and a fine display of literary genius. ?Charlotte Simmons? is a thorough survey of the most self-destructive and immoral environment imaginable?the modern university. The sex is not very steamy or erotic either it is as unromantic as can be, just like it is on campus. Do not read this book if you intend on avoiding foul language and extreme sexual content?it is filled with both.

In order to be so true-to-life, though, it has to be very vulgar. The account of college life in this book is as authentic as it can be. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.ĭecadence through the eyes of a ?good girl?
With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s.

But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.Īs Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite, her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's god-like basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects the Young Turn 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. 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, who has come here on full scholarship.
