I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel Paperback – August 30, 2005

Charlotte Simmons is the definitive, classic American coming-of-age novel.Charlotte Simmons is a brilliant high school academic achiever and a model young woman in her rural community. She was raised by a strong and determined set of parents who had no education but who have run solid, honest lives within modest circumstances. Charlotte also had a distinct advantage of having been mentored by sophisticated, though not soigné, high school teacher who shows Charlotte her future in very specific terms.Critics have faulted Wolfe for being a fuddy duddy as he tells the story of Charlotte's loss of her virginity in the first semester of her first semester at a prestigious university. They natter away that, had Wolfe written the book in the 1950s, it would be shocking, revelatory and groundbreaking but that in 2005 this particular episode isn't worthy of Wolfe's attention.What these syntax flinging contributors fail to understand is that Charlotte Simmons was just trying desperately to provide herself with a basic life support structure she has left behind at a home that's completely inaccessible to anyone without cash, credit cards, or a cell phone. What Wolfe's detractors don't question is how would a young woman in 2005 find herself completely cut off from these kinds of resources? She's a girl who's never had them. Her support network had been mama, daddy, and Miss Pennington - all of who were stone's throw away on her mountain top.I recommend highly that Wolfe's critics google Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They might learn what they have not gleaned from reality TV --- that Maslow believed human beings have basic needs that must be satisfied before they can move on to think about other needs. Maslow tells us the first two primary needs that must be satisfied for any human being to exist are the physiological (air, water, food, and sleep), the psychological (safety, stability and consistency), and emotional (the longing to belong to a group.) We are not able to sleep, for example, because the person we live with makes sleep impossible, and as a result we may feel sickness, irritation, pain, discomfort, and extreme stress. Our discomfort forces us to satisfy this need as soon as possible, in any way we can. If we do not feel safe in a new environment, if our new life is chaotic and unstable, we will cringe with anxiety and be totally consumed by until we can find safety. An abused wife cannot think about getting a better education, for example, if she's in constant fear for her life. Studying math, science and language have to wait until the abused wife is no longer crying out in fear. We all crave stability and consistency, but sometimes where we have no way to reach them. Love and belonging are one step up Maslow's pyramid. We all want to belong to groups, as we all need to be accepted by others and to feel loved by them. It's no stretch to see Charlotte Simmons in the same leaky boat. Despite the fact that she has been brought to the best university in the country on a full scholarship, Charlotte cannot become absorbed in her studies -- inspired by neuroscience, enthralled by her drama class -- until she can sleep without being woken up at 3 a.m., forced from her room by her sexually active roommate, and left to sit up in a lounge. In a parallel search for friendship and love, she finds only shallow acquaintances who are only interested in the names to which she attaches herself. One name in particular seems to be offering love, affection and a safe harbor only to be revealed as a duplicitous, cunning and predatory beast who dumps her carcass by the side of the kennel.Charlotte Simmons is a refugee from the remote Carolina wilderness who has nothing and no one to fall back on. There is no safety net for her. No checking account, no credit card, no patient bank officer managing her trust fund, and no cuddly grandmother who could be relied on to slip some currency into a greeting card for her. By contrast her roommate is the daughter of a Fortune 500 CEO with every expensive privilege on display. Charlotte allows herself to feel inferior and intimidated. She loses her footing in her own values and ethics, and she only begins to regain them with the help of someone just like her. The remarkable thing about Wolfe's novel is that , with absolutely nothing to fall back on, Charlotte is able to climb out of her hole high enough fall back onto what she once believed about her place in the world - that, given the right choice of people, she can feel superior to everyone around her. And when she can regain this feeling, she will be safe, and her world would become predictable and controllable. At that point she will be able to read, study, write, and achieve. This is why her attachment to JoJo the thick-headed basketball player cum philosophy student works, and why her membership in the Millennium Mutants does not. It's all or nothing with Charlotte -she must be on top to function, to be Charlotte Simmons.I Am Charlotte Simmons defines the distorted sense of time felt by all American adolescents. At 18, many of felt that one mistake would be fatal. One poorly written paper would ruin a career, one failed relationship would mean a life of isolation, one slip from perfection would mean a world of turned backs. Wolfe takes us through this distortion so beautifully that I Am Charlotte Simmons should be the primer for all college students on perspective, balance, flexibility, and time.

I'm only half-way into this book and already I can tell you that Tom Wolfe tells it like it is! He writes with the energy and panache of an ageless (and authentic) wunderkind. People who decry this book as "unrealistic" are just fooling themselves. Wake up! Take a look in the mirror, people! Tom doesn't shy away from showing you all the sad, petty, twisted and overwhelming obsessions of college life (which, of course, is just the real life shrinked down.) In fact, this book is SO realistically written that it's given me post-traumatic stress syndrome. I'm not kidding! In college (and high school) I was basically the Adam Gellin character - the dork, forced to kowtow to the jocks and always shot down by the hotties. Here's a little passage where Tom NAILS the mindframe of one of the a-hole jockstrap gorillas:"What did Adam the tutor amount to? He amounted to a male low in the masculine pecking order who is angry, deserves to be angry, is dying to show anger, but doesn't dare do so in the face of two alpha males, both of them physically intimidating as well as famous on the Dupont campus. Jojo had enjoyed this form of unspoken domination ever since he was twelve. It was a source of inexpressible satisfaction."Thank god somebody's got the guts to tell the TRUTH. Frankly, I think Wolfe is unjustly criticized on the basis of his age; people assume a 70-something author can't capture college kids' mental state. WRONG! Time and again I'm just blown away at how well he does it - the slang, the attitudes, the clothes, etc. The guy was clearly channeling!And one finally gets a true view into the workings of the female mind - the ostensibly "smart and sweet" Charlotte Simmons is just a sucker when it comes to hot guys; she can't see them for what they really are: a-holes. "Charlotte's pulse was rapid... She was excited...the only girl in a room in a fraternity house with a whole bunch of cool boys." Meanwhile, like in real-life, the poor dork in the form of Adam Gellin (ME) is shunned and shunted. Nerds lose. Frat-boys and jocks win. Like in real-life: Bush is President. While a nerd can't get a job or a girl and winds up spending too much time writing up a review for Amazon. Ha!Some readers complain the characters are stereotypes. Well, okay, Wolfe does skirt the margins of caricature. On the other hand, there really ARE people like this! If anything, his portrayals are HYPER-realistic. It's like he put a college campus under a microscope, and really ZOOMED in, until all the frightening details scream in your face. After all, what would've been the point of a bland, distant, birds-eye view? No, this is the only way it could've been done, had to be done, for the average, jaded reader to stand up and take notice.Also, Wolfe gives every character depth and dimension, lifting them above the stereotype category. Even the gorilla jock becomes a REAL PERSON. Often he'll break the narrative flow to launch into a long exposition on how a character became what he or she is. You'd think it'd be boring, but it's actually not. You feel their desires, hopes, fears, everything.AS FOR STYLE - Tom has enough to spare. I've never read a book by him before, namely because I assumed he'd be boring (most books dubbed as "literary" tend to turn me off), but wow was I wrong! This guy breaks every rule in the book and makes it work! He's like some hybrid of Bret Easton Ellis and Hubert Selby jr (and maybe a dash of Chuck Palahniuk?). He uses plenty of repetition (creating a crazed rhythm), will use all CAPS in dialogue (like Selby for emphasis), will phonetically spell out slang and sounds effects like "Woooooooooooooo!" and "oohooooo....oohoooooo...." and ":::::STATIC:::::" and is no stranger to using ellipses and wild streams-of-consciousness. He's clearly having an exhilarating good time with the English language. This is the book that Bret's "Rules of Attraction" wanted (or should've) been. While Bret is a great stylist as well, his book bogs down under its too-episodic going-nowhere structure and characters that all sound the same. Not here. Wolfe always maintains a "through-line" - things connect, there's a sense the characters are headed for a showdown (psychic or physical). Or to put it another way: THE PROPULSIVE ENERGY OF THIS BOOK COULD POWER ALL THE LIGHTS AND SUBWAYS OF MANHATTAN FOR A YEAR.The chapter entitled, "The `H' Word" alone is worth the price of the book! It's a laugh out-loud expose' of the weight-rooms and body-conscious culture of America. The men with their "curious, apelike straddle gait." The females on cardio-machines with their rear, sweat-stained "declivities." And poor "unsexed" Adam running around, hoping to bulk up. Read it! Nobody has made you seen it more vividly.Okay, I could on and on, but I need to stop somewhere. Suffice to say - I would give this book 20 stars if I could! It's one of those rare books that hits a nerve in you, expresses everything inside of you. It's real. It's the truth.PS - I will post a Pt. II follow-up when I done. Stay tuned! ;)

I have worked in higher education for over 30 years and I have never read a better book for preparing new students for the world that is to come. It reads like a mix between a good novel and academic participant observation research. I highly recommend it even if you are not about to be a college freshman.

It is very well written and structured and it does not disappoint at the end.

Voici un livre où la décadence et son opposé - le puritanisme américain, se côtoient avec beaucoup de pertinence. Charlotte Simmons devient le prisme à travers lequel l'auteur décrit le monde des universités américaines d'une voix neutre, à la limite de la froideur et de l'analyse sociale. On ne compatit pas avec les personnages, mais on les observe, on les décortique et on les étudie... On est très proche de la satire sociale jusqu'aux dernières lignes mêmes du roman. On passe un très bon moment, c'est bien écrit, et la lecture est passionnante. Une belle lecture, un grand (et gros!! 738 pages!) roman de notre époque, une future référence sûrement...

Yo estaba muy contento a más novelas de Tom Wolfe despues de "A Man in Full", que me gustó mucho, pero este libro no convence nada. Ni es divertido, ni tragico, ni interesante... los personajes no convencen, especialmente Charlotte. Da la impresión de que TW no entiende las mujeres, y desprecia los hombres, que quizás con una sátira más aguda se puede aceptar, pero en este libro lo único que hace es quitar interés. Sorry.

Tom Wolfe is one of my favourite writers. I loved The Right Stuff (his best book, in my view) and enjoyed Bonfire, and A Man in Full also. So I looked forward to reading this, and for a lot of the time was not disappointed. I think it says a lot for his skills that he was able to get into the head of a young woman from a certain kind of background and tell her story in a way that shows real understanding. That was great.A problem I had though that it was not really possible to really like any of the characters. Even Simmons - as another commenter has written - gets on my nerves a bit. Yes it must have been a shock for a person of that background to be confronted with the sort attitudes she saw and felt (getting "sexiled" by her room-mate and sneered at), etc. But part of me wanted to give her a sharp talking-to and tell her to toughen up a bit.The other characters in the book are, to varying degrees, unlovely creatures and dislikeable. They conform to types we have all met: the nerdy guy who cannot get a date and who wants to save the world (Adam); the sex- and sports-mad "frat boy" who has Daddy to bail him out and who expects to glide into an investment banking role (mind you, those days are over); the snooty former boarding school pupil (Beverley); the leftist lecturer with a hatred of sports (Quat) and so on. There is comedy here; however, some of the dialogue is so crazily rude that you do kind of wonder if college really is that crazy.More broadly, the novel tackles something that bugs me: the obsession that so many people have to "fit in" and "be cool". On one level, there is nothing necessarily wrong with this but it can become destructive when it means that you'd rather be "one of the gang" than be so "uncool" as to care about achieving excellence in academia. This is a problem not just for boys, but girls also. Anyone who has had to put up with being bullied for being a "nerd" or "swat" at school by the "jocks" will know what I mean.Wolfe doesn't write about one of the very current problems with US academia: the skyrocketing costs of funding and debt. Many graduates with their liberal arts degrees can end up with a nice-looking ticket, a lot of debt, and a financial problem. And yet the urge to go to a smart-sounding school to get that "ticket" retains an allure out of sync with the reality.One thing disappointed me about the book is that we never really find out what happened to the main characters (I won't spoil the plot by saying exactly what I was looking for). It would have been great to find out what Charlotte Simmons eventually did at the school.On the whole, a good read. Not his best, but still very good.

Just read 2 of Woolfie's books back-to-back, or should that be front-to-back-to-back. OMG I'm beginning to think like him. All his favourite targets are there - modern art ( Chagal and Malevich get a pasting - I have a Malevich poster on my wall from a London exhibition, political correctness, sexual mores (especially of the young), political posturing, nepotism and corruption, Puritan attitudes (which he seems to respect) and undercover racism. As with all thematic novels, the characters are bent to fit the target, though the main characters - Nestor Camacho and Charlotte Simmons are well drawn and provide the reader with a personal focus. Unfortunately to hit his prey the number of coincidences and absurdities begin to mount. But I forgave all that as the narration rollicked along - not forgetting his favourite and repeated vocabulary of sheerly, citizenry, gloaming (never heard that used outside a Scottish context i.e. Roamin in gloamin with my lassie by my side, When the sun etc.) and so on. In each case the last chapter is a cop-out and tidies up posse ends that would be better left loose and hanging. Nevertheless both are extremely good reads, as the fact that I had to stay up to 4am to finish one of them. With now go back and read my first and most enjoyable Tom Woolf novel, Bonfire of the Vanities. These two novels are definitely that the Woof canon, and none the worse for that.