You can admire his 1989 literary manifesto skewering the vogue for autobiographical fiction and calling for a sweeping new “social novel” that encompasses the “lurid carnival” of American society. What’s more, he does not fight the guys next door he fights the guys in his own backyard, the guys he shares the deck chair with, the guys who review his books and write their own. This is the man who told a British paper that he does not feel alive unless he’s fighting somebody-and fight he does. The 73-year-old New Journalist turned novelist has provoked so much ire among America’s intelligentsia in part because he’s gone out looking for it. Wolfe is both a deliberate and an accidental irritant. Let us pause, for a moment, on the second. The second thing is that he is profoundly irritating.

I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.The first thing that must be said about Tom Wolfe-and there are many good and grave souls who won’t say it-is that he is some kind of genius.

With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.Īs Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite-her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, 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 Turn 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 gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives. America's 'peerless observer' ( People) uncovers college life-from jocks to mutants, dormcest to tailgating-plus race, class, sex, and basketballĭupont University-the Olympian halls of learning 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, who has come here on full scholarship.

I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe