Tom Wolfe ò 1 READ & DOWNLOAD
Tom Wolfe, the master social novelist of our time, the spot-on chronicler of all things contemporary and cultural, presents a sensational new novel about life, love, and learning--or the lack of it--amid today's American colleges.
Our story unfolds at fictional Dupont University: those Olympian halls of scholarship 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. 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.
As Charlotte encounters the paragons of Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk 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 is seduced by the heady glamour of acceptance, betraying both her values and upbringing before she grasps the power of being different--and the exotic allure of her own innocence.
With his trademark satirical wit and famously sharp eye for telling detail, Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons draws on extensive observations at campuses across the country to immortalize the early-21st-century college-going experience. I am Charlotte Simmons
Halfway through Tom Wolfe's enormous new novel about contemporary college life, I finally devised a question to keep my interest piqued: Is it humanly possible, I wondered, to write another 100 pages - another 200 pages, another 300 pages - without describing a single surprising event?
It is.
With I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe has ventured onto the university campus and sent back reams of hyperventilating testimony: College students are slovenly and crude. They drink way too much. They listen to obscene music. They engage in casual and exploitative sex. They put their feet on the furniture - even leather sofas and fine woodwork.
But wait, there's more: College students would rather socialize than study. It's all right here, spelled out in tones of amazement, like George H.W. Bush telling us about those new scanners at the grocery store.
If you haven't seen Animal House or anything on the WB, you'll be surprised to learn that collegiate society is divided between jocks and nerds. The jocks are very athletic, but not very smart, whereas the nerds are very smart, but not very athletic.
Am I going too fast?
To write this novel, Wolfe claims that he had only to reassemble the material he had accumulated visiting campuses across the country, a technique that may explain the book's superficiality. This isn't the anthropology of the Ordinary - a potentially revelatory approach; it's just a dramatization of clichés.
Even the style lacks Wolfe's usual verve. He's particularly interested in the way modern Americans talk, but in his Rip Van Winkle voice, we get endless explanations and reenactments of what he calls the undergraduate vocabulary, a discovery he highlights in a brief dedication to his children. Most of the dialogue is written in a profane patois that Wolfe spells out as though he's recording the grunts and clicks of a lost dialect from Inner Mongolia. But he has nothing to add to Norman Mailer's far more daring analysis of American profanity some 40 years ago in Armies of the Night.
Even more tedious than the affected slips of Southern and African-American dialects are his needless parenthetical translations: I can't (cain't) stand them('em). And when characters yell at each other, their words are written in caps so that we know THEY'RE SPEAKING VERY LOUDLY.
The story follows the rise and fall of Charlotte Simmons, a brilliant country bumpkin from Sparta, N.C., (pop. 900), who wins a scholarship to Dupont University, one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. Charlotte's parents are simple folk, devout Christians, who have instilled in their daughter a deep sense of morality. They don't drink, swear, put on airs, or take no stock in your highfalutin citified ways. Along with a devoted teacher at school, they have instilled in Charlotte a sense of her exceptionalism that inspires the novel's title, which is also a sort of inspirational mantra for the heroine.
Charlotte heads off to Dupont University expecting to enter the august halls of academe, but she quickly finds that it's a brothel, seething with vain, vicious girls and crude, drunken boys. Her snobby roommate won't have anything to do with her. The coed bathrooms are an abomination. Athletes on the basketball team don't take their classes seriously. And hunky frat boys pretend to be interested in your mind, but they're interested in only one thing. (I won't spoil it for you.)
Poor Charlotte is consumed with loneliness and confusion. Everyone mocks her clothes, her naiveté, her virginity, her tee-totaling. Professors recognize her brilliance, but brilliance doesn't matter in this marketplace of drunken flesh. So, how can she resist when the hottest boy on campus asks her to the Spring Formal? (Wolfe Note: The term hottest is not a reference to the temperature of his body, but to the developed musculature of his body, which, along with a number of male bodies in this book, is described with slobbering attention.)
Meanwhile, one of the nerds who works for the school paper (where else?) is pursuing a scandal that could rock American politics, but don't worry about that potentially interesting thread; it never leads off campus - or toward anything.
The only issue that develops some traction in this novel is race. Wolfe explored that more profoundly in The Bonfire of Vanities and A Man in Full, but his portrayal here of the racial tensions on the college basketball court is engaging. He shows a sport played largely by black men for the entertainment of white fans in an academic setting that contorts its principles to keep the whole industry going.
The cynical coach reaps millions; the pasty professor growls about academic standards; the expedient college president maintains an uneasy truce. All these characters play to type, but at the center of this subplot is a white basketball star who feels threatened by the talent and aggression of black players all around him. Why, he wonders, do they have access to a whole range of words and stances that are forbidden to him? What's more, he's starting to feel attracted to a life of the mind that he can just barely imagine. But this minor development is buried in a variety of borrowed plot lines, including a climactic bit of satire about political correctness that might have been sharp 20 years ago.
The problem isn't really the inclusion of so many cliché characters; sadly, there are plenty of real students who fall into these categories. What's galling about this novel is its persistent lack of nuance, its reduction of the whole spectrum of people on a college campus to these garish primary colors.
Wolfe wrote a much discussed essay for Harper's in 1989, A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel. Instead of the cerebral games that now pass for fiction, he argued, American novelists should head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property. This is good advice. When he took it, he hog-stomped out two baroque novels, first about New York and then about Atlanta. But cooped up on campus with Charlotte Simmons he's too predictable and too late to reclaim anything of interest.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1109/p1... 738 Sigh.
771 pages. Talking about college. How college is shocking for sheltered girls. How college (shocker) isn't really about academia, but sports, beer, sex, and pretty much everything that the university brochures lie about in order to protect their reputations and continue charging $30,000 a year for an education. This could be written by ANYONE, and in less than HALF the pages.
When a book is bad, and too long, there is a certain point in reading the same shit over and over when your mind just screams SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!. This happened to me about half way through when I got sick of even the most random characters who appear only once in the story, having their entire family histories mapped out for the reader since the 1800's. Filler? Some sort of psychological explanation of the character? NO. BORING. EDITOR?? WHERE ARE YOU!? CUT THIS SHIT. Also, we don't need every single regional accent spelled out for us. Charlotte is from the South. We don't need to be reminded after the says get that she pronounces it git. We don't need to be told that a dude from Brooklyn says what do you want? and then have it rewritten again after the quote as whaddaya want?. Fuck me. If that wasn't enough, can we stop this shit of shooting looks that are as if to say....? He shot her a look as if to say fuck you, she shot him a look as if to say I hate you, etc. UGH.
Granted, this book did get the Bad Sex Award in 2003. But since it doesn't even happen until page 2394875485723847, it's not just BAD, it's boring. How anyone managed to FIND this bad sex without skimming over it or simply falling asleep is completely beyond me. I'm shocked that this didn't get the Bad Book Award of 2003.
If you want a good, engaging, and true-to-life story about a fish out of water in her academic environment, read Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep. Use I am Charlotte Simmons only for expensive toilet paper or to stop a bullet.
Sucked. 738 Yawn or cringe? Eye roll? So imagine your grandpa takes you out to the Dog 'n Suds for a root beer float. He goes on to tell you about what life was like at college - not for him but for you. He sprinkles in terms like phat and shorty and rad and rutting throughout his tale. Grandpa has been dipping into the Dictionary of American Youth Slang written by the Youth Minister at his church, who has covered the volume in a plain black cover lest it fall into the hands of the few blessed innocents out there, people like Charlotte Simmons, who would only become distraught at how _dirty_ and crude people are.
The point of all of this? Grandpa wants to make sure you know that college is a place of wildly raging hormones, cliques one hoped would have magically disappeared once the threshhold of the high school's doors have been crossed one last time, and LOTS of liquor. You know, in case you missed it on your trip through. He also wants to be sure you know what kind of bullet you dodged at your alma mater and how relieved you should be about it. *ahem*
Don't forget to let Grandpa know that he has dribbled ketchup all down his white suit while talking. You don't want him to be embarrassed by himself, now do you?
________
Disclaimer: The grandpa (Tom Wolfe-like)in this account is fictitious (sorta) and bears no resemblance whatsoever to the author's own grandpa, with the exception of the love of a good A&W root beer float.
738 I came to I Am Charlotte Simmons with trepidation. I had read the reviews that likened Wolfe to a voyeur and questioned his motivation in spending years observing typical college students fifty years his junior. It seemed creepy. But when I saw it in the bargain bin, I couldn't resist, and as it turned out, I couldn't put the thing down. Wolfe is a great writer and storyteller, and although there are some weird things about the book, like his linguistic obsessions over current uses of profanity, he presents a compelling story and a fascinating character in Charlotte. Charlotte, a brilliant student from the impoverished, rural North Carolina, earns a scholarship to the prestigious Dupont University, and dreams of intellectual stimulation unlike she has ever known. Instead, she finds a world of wealth, privilege, and debauchery. Although she wants to play the games of sexual intrigue of her classmates, she has none of the requisite accompanying hardness and cynicism, so her efforts are personally devastating. Wolfe deftly tackles big themes--purity, vanity, greed, social class. He may have gotten some of the details wrong, and if you are currently a college student I'm sure you will find much with which to quarrel, but the bigger story is superb. 738 This was far too long. When I am 200 pages into a book, I do not want a 50 page background on a character that probably wont matter anyway. Read The Rules of Attraction or The Sorrows of Young Mike if you want to know about college kids. Tom Wolfe is for people who have a lot of time on their hands. 738
Non posso dire che mi abbia deluso perchè non ho mai letto niente di questo scrittore e non sapevo cosa aspettarmi. Posso dire che il personaggio di Charlotte mi ha deluso, è una ragazza tipo voglio ma non posso e poi .. alla fine il suo fidanzamento (non dico altro per non far scoprire la storia) mi ha lasciato veramente male. 738 738 σελίδες απόλυτης, συνεχόμενης και ασταμάτητης παπαρολογίας που το ξεκίνησα ντάλα καλοκαίρι και με βρήκαν τα Χριστούγεννα μέχρι να το τελειώσω διότι όπως πολύ καλά καταλάβατε αυτή η γκουμούτσα δεν διαβάζεται με τίποτα. Ένα κακογραμμένο και δήθεν διδακτικό τεράστιο κείμενο για το κακό κολλέγιο και τους κινδύνους που ενέχει η απόφαση να πας να σπουδάσεις. Γεμάτο με τετριμμένους χαρακτήρες κολλεγιόπαιδων και μία σχεδόν τρομοκρατική προκατάληψη για το τα δεινά που μπορούν να σε βρουν περνώντας την πόρτα της σχολής. Λες και του ανέθεσαν από την εκκλησία να γραψει το εγχειρίδιο του καλού φοιτητή και της αμαρτωλής τεστοστερόνης, του φρικτού αλκοόλ, και της συμφοράς του να απομακρύνεσαι από την οικογενειακή εστία, τύφλα να έχει ο Περίανδρος Πώποτας και να το πλασάρει στη νεολαία υπό τον μανδύα ενός μυθιστορήματος. Που μάλλον αυτό έγινε διότι δεν μπορώ να εξηγήσω αλλιώς τον τρόπο με τον οποίο ο συγγραφέας εξηγεί στις προτάσεις του κάποια πολύ απλά ζητήματα λες και απευθύνεται σε δωδεκάχρονα (γκουχ, γκουχ) πχ αυτή είναι μία εφημερίδα, στην εφημερίδα διαβάζουμε τα νέα της ημέρας, η εφήμερίδα έχει αυτό το κόστος. Αστεράκια 2 και δεν θέλω να ξαναπιάσω Τομ Γουλφ στα χέρια μου ούτε αν τα βιβλία του είναι τα μόνα που θα διασωθούν μετά από μία τραγική καταστροφή του πολιτισμού. 738 I picked this up at the big garage sale that my work puts on. It caught my eye and I remember being interested in it after reading a review of it when it came out. It's a pretty thick book, over 750 pages, and I didn't plan on reading it for a while. I read the first few chapters when I got home and got very caught up in it. It is one of those books where once you've start reading it, everything else in your life takes a back seat and you can't do anything else but read the book until you're done. Apparently all of Tom Wolfe's books are like that, though I've only read this one. I'll let the New York Times say it better than I can: Like everything Wolfe writes, 'I Am Charlotte Simmons' grabs your interest at the outset and saps the desire to do anything else until you finish.
The book is basically a critique of the current state of higher education and the university lifestyle. The three main characters are students at a Dupont, a fictional prestigious liberal arts school on the east coast and their lives intersect through various plot threads. The title character, Charlotte, is the fish out of water from a small working-class town in West Virginia. She comes to Dupont full of innocence and ideals and the book is propelled by the story of her inevitable fall from grace and eventual redemption. There is one long extended chapter the book about Charlotte going to the big fraternity formal with her new boyfriend and his friends. Wolfe describes what is happening in real time with great detail (both material and emotional), and the result is an incredible and extremely moving piece of writing. If movies that present prom night as an magical evening where everyone's problems are somehow resolved are a zero on the realism scale, Wolfe's description of Charlotte's experience is an easy 10 .
One of the things that Wolfe does really well is observe the motivations behind people's words and actions, analyzing people in much the same way that a biologist would study the behavior of animals. To Tom Wolfe, every human interaction is a struggle for dominance, and he makes his case convincingly enough particularly when applied to the seemingly simple but incredibly complex social codes of the fraternities and sororities.
Wolfe does stumble occasionally, getting a bit out of his element, particularly when attempting to recreate the dialogue and slang of the black players on the college basketball team. He creates a rapper called Doctor Dis and writes lyrics for his songs in a few cringe-inducing passages. Still, you've got to give an old white guy credit for an attempt. A large part of Wolfe's critique is about class, and the sense of entitlement that well-heeled and well-educated feel. Wolfe lays it on a little too thick in describing Charlotte's humble background, however, and details like Charlotte's family having to use a picnic table inside because they couldn't afford a dining table seemed forced. One final criticism that I'll make is that I though that the end was too neat and sudden. I expected more of a payoff, though I was satisfied enough (if only just to see Charlotte okay again after everything that Wolfe puts her through).
This book got a lot of mixed reviews, and some critics really panned it, seeing it as a one of Wolfe's lesser books. I'm not familiar with his other works and with nothing else to compare it to, I was blown away and completely engrossed. I'd strongly recommend it, though only if you can afford to disappear for a week.
738 Is this the most innovative, unpredictable novel ever written? Nope, but I can't deny that Wolfe's nasty, satirical pageturner about millennial college life in the US is great fun. Protagonist Charlotte Simmons has grown up in the small town of Sparta, NC, in a conservative working class environment. When she starts college at the prestigious Dupont University, well-known for academic excellence and its successful athletics department (hello, Duke), virginal Charlotte has trouble fitting in with the more worldly rich kids, Greek letter organizations, and jocks. Aspiring to reach a higher position in the on-campus pecking order, she takes some measures that, due to her naivety and the cruelty of the social order, soon get out of control...
Sure, Wolfe employs quite some stereotypes and cliches, but it's not like these don't exist in reality. Everybody in this book is more or less unlikeable, and it speaks volumes that reading the text is still so much fun: Charlotte is lonely and insecure, but she is also arrogant and ignorant - and so are many other characters. While the story is narrated in the third person, we perceive everything from Charlotte's perspective, which means that we witness her reasonings and justifications, and they are psychologically believable and well-rendered. The intricate psychological writing is juxtaposed with many flashy, over-the-top characters who do flashy, over-the-top things (rich kids being the meanest mean girls imaginable, sports stars having sex with groupies and cheating their way through classes, unpopular nerds founding nerd clubs and fantasizing about their future success etc. pp.).
Wolfe's held back, matter-of-fact narration shows how the students at Dupont strife for status, but the author does not judge them - in fact, he does not even present one character that offers appealing alternative ways of behavior. This set-up gives the book its light, satirical flair, and while the novel certainly qualifies as social commentary, it is no o tempora, o mores lament. I enjoyed the easy flow, the entertaining story and the many subplots of the text, so while this is no literary masterpiece, it's a good book that tells quite some truths about life in general.
Incidentally, the wonderful Hasan Minhaj has recently produced a great episode of Patriot Act entitled Is College Still Worth It?, pondering some of the trends Wolfe talks about as well (but in the context of the Corona crisis). 738 Wow. I believe you can write about being young no matter how old you are. However, I don't know if you can write about being young and going to college in 2004, when you haven't been young (or attended college) since the Eisenhower administration.
This absurd novel, which fails as a novel in any convention sense except perhaps self-satire, follows the travails of a beautiful, smart, yet pure-as-the driven-snow hillbilly angel, who emerged out of what sounds like a hobbit hole in Western North Carolina and landed at Duke, I mean, Dupont University, where all the women are rich sorority girls, radicalized lesbian separatists or grotesque underlings who grovel and drool in the dorm hallways at night like some great unwashed mass of medieval lepers. And where all the men are spoiled fratboy rapists, self-deluding, sleazy leftists or wholesome (white!) basketball players who love their mamas.
I would like to challenge anyone who has been to college in the past twenty years to find something in Charlotte Simmons that is remotely believable. I live about fifteen minutes from Wolfe's model for Dupont University and grew up in Western North Carolina and I can tell you this book might as well be set on Mars, as far as I'm concerned. Reading it requires a suspension of disbelief quite a bit greater than that needed to enjoy Harry Potter, and I literally threw this book across the room no less than a dozen times whilst reading it.
Basically, what I learned is that Tom Wolfe is either actually a sexist, racist, elitist, ignorant, patronizing scumbag or he's so woefully out of touch that he doesn't realize this book makes him seem like all of those things.
738
