Radical Georgia Moderate

I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

The story of a little mountain girl high school valedictorian who shows up to big prestigious (and fictional) Dupont University with stars in her eyes, hoping for the life of the mind. What she finds instead is a vapid sex- and booze-obsessed moral vacuum. With about 100 pages remaining, I was ready to drag this one over the coals, but it was pretty skillful the way Wolfe tied the loose ends up. On the plus side, it moves quickly for a book near 700 pages, has moments of real descriptive brilliance, and does show a more competent grasp of modern slang and attitudes among college students than most Amazon reviewers have been giving him credit for. There is an overriding theme of a nature versus nurture conflict within Charlotte that plays out pretty realistically. On the downside, the supporting characters around Charlotte were mostly pigeonhole-perfect stereotypes of college life (the basketball star… the fraternity president… the brainy outcast, et al.). Wolfe was waaaaayyyy out of his depth describing anything and everything relating to computers, which might not sound important, but was because of how integral and unavoidable they are in the average college student’s life. They come up often here too, as they should, but it’s easy to see they must baffle the man. I have A Man in Full sitting on my shelf from a long-ago raid on McKay’s used book store in Knoxville, maybe I’ll read it later this year and it’ll be better.