I am Charlotte Simmons

Reading Tom Wolfe is a pleasure. Cascades of words, images, dialogue, description, action and interior monologue laced with research and perception are wrapped in a thick, rich package of humor and sentiment. This book would be a great read even if it were not about anything, but it is. Wolfe is a literary photojournalist who uses the medium of fiction as a means of social commentary, and in I am Charlotte Simmons his focus is on academia. While the portrayal of prestigious if fictional Dupont University as hamstrung by political correctness and fueled by sex and alcohol where the basketball coach is king has been criticized by academics as unfair it has been lauded at least by my daughter as a reasonably accurate portrayal of college life in 2004. She knows better than I do.

I am a little skeptical about Charlotte. Portrayed as coming to sophisticated Dupont from the hills of North Carolina Charlotte seemed to me to be less a person from a different place than a time traveler, a person from 1958 moved forward in time and baffled by the sexual and cultural revolutions. But, while the focus on the book is certainly on Dupont and Charlotte’s reactions to it, I could not help but notice that Charlotte starts out as less a person than a set of credentials, and her self-affirming "I am Charlotte Simmons" masks a certain lack of character. At Dupont Charlotte finds herself inadequate and seeks identity from men, both a frat boy and a jock, and her "I am Charlotte Simmons" loses its meaning. Charlotte is also strangely unable to tell the truth to anyone on almost any subject. I started turning over pages at every place where Charlotte told a lie and found a lot of turned pages. Introduced in Chapter 2 she speaks 5 times, 4 of which are lies or dissembling. I had some trouble with the heroine.

A great book. Brilliant writing is a reward in itself.