REVIEW: Book

"I am Charlotte Simmons" ought to be required reading for college students. Unfortunately, the amount of profanity and sexually explicit content in this novel by Tom Wolfe makes this book an impossible addition to any official reading list.

Set at the fictional Dupont University, "I am Charlotte Simmons" is narrated by not only the title character but also basketball superstar Jojo Johanssen and Hoyt Thorpe, the moneyed Saint Ray Fraternity's golden boy of cool.

Charlotte comes to the prestigious Dupont from the mountain town of Sparta, N.C. Brilliant but naïve, she is thrown into the decadence and depravity of coed life, with a sex-crazed roommate whose wealthy parents and prep school education stand in stark contrast to Charlotte's impoverished background. She is shocked to find debasing activities such as drinking, swearing and hooking up run rampant at this revered institute of higher learning. She yearns to find a "life of the mind," as she calls it, and she begins to when she meets Adam Geller, who writes for the student newspaper and with his friends has formed the self-named "Millennial Mutants," a group of friends set out to pursue higher honors and intellectual rather than hedonistic gratification.

At first Charlotte eschews Dupont's social offerings in favor of the library, and her studies gain the notice of her neuroscience professor. Her midterm grades are all A plusses. However, the beautiful, athletic girl with incredible legs from running in the mountains (this is a point Wolfe harps on a lot, what great shape her legs are in) soon attracts the attention of some socially prominent figures at Dupont, namely Hoyt, the fraternity's coolest brother. Drawn to the promise of acceptance, Charlotte gradually begins to shed the insular layer of her humble and religious beginnings, trading her style-less but functional blue jeans in for a pair of Diesels and slipping the occasional curse word into her speech. So lays the foundation for a dramatic rise and fall scenario that drives this very long novel full of side plots involving the racial dynamics of the campus, specifically the basketball team, the fraternity culture of privilege and the Millennial Mutants' quest for intellectual influence.

I do not recommend this book as an accurate picture of what college is like. The world middle-aged Wolfe (somewhat creepily if you look at his white-suited picture and gray-coiffed sober smile on the book's back jacket) creates for Dupont is exaggerated and excessive, supposedly because it is seen through the inexperienced eyes of Charlotte. For one thing, it focuses entirely on the social side and basically neglects the academic realm (other than to show Charlotte's decline), but this is necessary for the juiciest story. I do not even entirely recommend this book as the cautionary tale some tout it as, because Charlotte's situation is so unlikely. Her series of choices, while necessary for an exciting novel, would never really happen all together to one person.

I recommend "I am Charlotte Simmons" as a different kind of cautionary tale, one that tells the importance of not losing your sense of self. Charlotte's self-esteem journey throughout the book goes from high (kind of arrogant in my opinion, but it is a forgivable kind of self-righteousness) to low (depressed to the point of thinking herself worthless) and back to a more realistic kind of high. The situations she faces, taken together, are certainly unrealistic, but on an individual basis they provide a reasonable description of circumstances a college student might encounter. When read with those caveats in mind, it becomes a decent window into some aspects of college life, a good guide to how not to cope with change, and is entertaining along the way.

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