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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Guide Weather Subscribe Contact Us January 13, 2005 Tom Wolfe's book, 'I am Charlotte Simmons,' satisfies By Chris Honor� Ashland Daily Tidings Tom Wolf has a remarkable genius. He is a master storyteller, who is also gifted with extraordinary powers of observation, combined with an ability to weave same into a story that is not only informative, in the sense that the reader is immersed in a particular cultural milieu, but surprisingly, even delightfully compelling. Over the last several decades he has repeatedly flexed this muscular ability to capture a wedge of Americana and give it force and new dimension. Consider those contemporary, socially incisive classics such as "The Electric Acid Kool-Aide Test," "The Right Stuff," "A Man in Full" and "Bonfire of the Vanities." In "I am Charlotte Simmons," Wolfe creates a naive protagonist in one Charlotte Simmons, a brilliant student from the smallest of towns in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and puts her on the campus of one of the most prestigious and lofty universities in America, Dupont (read any of the prominent eastern universities). And though Charlotte is academically prepared to step into any class and prevail, so honed are her academic skills, she is most definitely ill-prepared for the juggernaut referred to as "campus life." And it is Charlotte's baptism into campus society that the reader is introduced, with energy and humor and startling fresh prose, to a culture that while ever-present and evolving on campuses across America, remains remote, available only to those who are living it. In other words, if you're not there, you can't really understand. And even if you were there, that was then and, as Wolfe so insightfully proves, this is now. Is it ever. It is through Charlotte's eyes that we are introduced to the frats, to what it means to be cool and uncool, what sports means to a top tier university, and to the sexual mores of that collective known as the undergraduates, the bonds of which have become so loose that restraint has all but evaporated, displaced by a level of carnality that, for the unprepared, simply takes your breath away. What is talked about, in the most open and frank and base patois, is also done. Wolfe writes in a clean an easygoing style that is completely accessible; however, his rapid-fire prose is also complex, electric even, filled with descriptions that would cause any trained anthropologist to sigh with envy. He takes the reader on a journey into the territory known as the "college campus" and describes its inhabitants, that tribe that has come together to do far more than just crack the books, right down to their Diesel jeans, hot overcoats, spiffy khakis, de rigueur shirts and shoes and tonsorial fashion, their ritualistic parties and sense of entitlement and dominion over all that is known as "campus life." Wolfe loads up each page with language and observations that, while prodigious and endlessly interesting, never overshadow the story. Here are the frats and sororities, the independents, the intellectuals, the professors, the dorms, the uber-coach, the jocks, the hard-core "playas," and so much more. And all of it is sorted out, at times disastrously, by Charlotte, who is wide-eyed, a deer caught in the blindingly bright headlights of an experience for which nothing in her background could ever have prepared her. While "I am Charlotte Simmons" is long (676 pages), it only spans one semester and the plot never feels unwieldily. Wolfe never loses control. And truth be told, when that last page is turned it is with regret that the door to Dupont closes, for time spent there, on campus, with the characters, with Charlotte, is not only interesting but enlightening. Parents of children who are twitching with anticipation as they prepare to leave hearth and home and head off to a campus somewhere in the U.S. this fall should read this novel and then ... well, do what? At least know that it's a whole new world out there and once the son or daughter says good-bye, perhaps standing in that small dorm room no larger than the pantry at home, life will never be the same. Not for him or her and certainly not for the parents. If you doubt that, then by all means, find "I am Charlotte Simmons" and give it a slow and careful read. It is, at the very least, profoundly edifying. 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