I Am Charlotte Simmons,  Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, NY, 2004) ***

 

I must warn you about two things up front.  This is a long book, nearly 700 pages;  and don’t give it to someone who is about to send their son or daughter off to college, especially if they’re going to be living in a dorm.  As for the first warning, I’m not usually fond of overly long books but this one seemed to end all too soon.  As I began reading, I entered the life of a dorm-living college student (for about the fourth time) and I wasn’t quite ready to leave it when the book ended.  Tom  Wolfe’s writing does that to you..  As for my second warning, I still hope that there’s more than a little hyperbole in  his descriptions of rampant drug use, casual sex and sports idolatry on his imaginary ivy-league campus of Dupont University (and yes, I do rank sports idolatry as an equal with drugs and casual sex on my list of ‘undesirables’).

 

The story begins in Sparta, a small town in the mountainous area of North Carolina, where Charlotte, brilliant and attractive, is finishing high school and is awarded a scholastic scholarship to prestigious Dupont University.  Despite her scholastic aptitude, Sparta’s isolated, impoverished environment and her unworldly parents have not prepared her for life in a co-ed dormitory at a big name university.  And as you might have guessed, her room mate is a wealthy and snobbish prep school girl from the Northeast.

 

Charlotte discovers early on that parties, fraternity guys and jocks are the main pursuits of her roommate and her friends.  It’s more important to be ‘cool’ than  to be smart, and the friends you choose determine your success or failure in campus social life.  She discovers the power that jocks command and the way courses and grades are managed to ensure that star players aren’t disqualified academically.  And she discovers that sex is the number one topic on everyone’s agenda, both to talk about and to engage in.  This alien world and her first time away from home at first overwhelm her, but she is determined to succeed.  She is Charlotte Simmons. 

 

The various campus types--the frat boy, the jock, the party girl, the socially isolated intellectual are caricatures, but they are made real by Tom Wolfe, as they each face obstacles and deal with them (or not), in ways that keep you turning the pages.  I believe it’s one of Wolfe’s better books, maybe approaching his The Right Stuff, the best novelized account of our first seven astronauts that’s been written.