Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Almost as good as the rest, 15 May 2006
I love Tom Wolfe's novels - whenever I need true and utter escapism, they never fail to deliver what I am looking for, and this book is no exception. Once again the author skillfully provides insight into the lives of a vivid and varied range of characters, all centring on Charlotte Simmons, the first year university student struggling to cope with the culture shock of leaving behind small town life. At times the empathy I felt with Charlotte overwhelmed me and (much as I usually berate those who make statements like this) found myself marvelling that a male author could emulate such an intrinsically female viewpoint so effectively.
I did, however, feel marginally disappointed with the ending, which felt rushed and each character dealt with a little too easily. But don't let that put you off - this is well worth buying.
|
|
|
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
ANOTHER TRIUMPH BY TOM WOLFE, 5 Nov 2004
How does one describe the release of a new work by Tom Wolfe? It's an event, an eagerly awaited occasion and, in this case, a triumph. In preparation for his story of Charlotte Simmons Mr. Wolfe visited numerous campuses throughout the country, talking, listening, observing with his telling eye for nuance and detail. Of this experience he has said, "....I went to a lot of fraternity parties, and this is where age comes in. Most people had absolutely no idea who I was, I was just this old guy at the party. I was too old to be a drug enforcement agent, so I was not a threat. That worked very well...In my mind anyway this is both the story of a young woman in a difficult, new environment and also a depiction of the American University today." Of course, that is precisely what this story is about, but no one could write it as has Mr. Wolfe. Charlotte leaves her small Blue Ridge Mountain town believing that as a freshman at Dupont University she will expand her mind, increase her mental acuity. She is both brilliant and beautiful. But rather than finding young people with similar lofty goals she meets wealthy, blase students much more interested in sex, beer, and drugs. In an unfamiliar environment, longing to be accepted, Charlotte soon finds herself abandoning her lofty ideals in order to be a part of this intriguing new life. That's far from the end of her story, but you should read it from beginning to end in the words of Tom Wolfe. Sure to be compared to Mr. Wolfe's groundbreaking "The Bonfire of the Vanities," "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is one more sterling achievement by one of America's foremost writers.
|
|
|
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not a fan of the ladies, 16 Oct 2007
I picked up Tom Wolfe's new novel, I am Charlotte Simmons, with a high degree of expectation. After all, Wolfe is a brilliant writer and his `social realism' manifesto is very sympathetic to me, no matter how many of his contemporaries insist in dismissing him as `just' a journalist. But I have to admit that the alarm bells started ringing around page 3, when Wolfe describes a faux biological experience that, basically, tells you *exactly* how the whole book is going to turn out. Now as a reader, I can only think of two reasons why an author would do this: a) you are about to read a `tour de force', which makes the author confident enough to let you know how it's going to be since the very beginning; or b) you are in for a rant. And in this case, I was in for a 700 page long rant. On the plus side, Wolfe is angry, and he is not afraid to show it, which provides the reader with wonderful set pieces dripping with sarcasm, vivid and brilliantly written tableaux of college life, and a stinging indictment of America's moral turpitude. But on the other hand, you are also in for one of the most manipulative, cruel, and disgusted books that you will ever read - especially concerning its main protagonist.
Charlotte Simmons is not a human being; she is not even a caricature, like the rest of the characters that people Wolfe's large canvas (the necessary downside of Wolfe's ambitious social realism); she is an instrument, and nothing more. Whatever inner-life she has (if you can even call it that) is there to serve the author's purpose. She doesn't so much grow or change during the novel, she merely reveals herself. And what she reveals is not pretty. Nor is it pretty to realize that her apparent innocence was just a gimmick used by Wolfe to serve his initial objective: to introduce a virtual alien into Dupont (what else can you call a girl like Charlotte, who appears to have been born and bred in a mountain cocoon) to get the kind of disgusted reaction that Wolfe wants to express.
But that's the main problem: her initial reactions aren't really hers (at least not in the sense that they represent her true self, as we discover later), they're the ones she was conditioned to have before her true nature breaks through the thin veil of purity that was instilled in her as a child. Dupont didn't make Charlotte shallow and superficial: she was already like that in her little mountain hamlet of Sparta. It's just that she was convinced that the best way to get attention was to study and be intelligent, to live a life of the mind, as she puts it, and that university would provide her with the opportunity to shine even brighter in that respect. When Charlotte discovers that to get noticed at Dupont you basically have to be good looking and available to sleep with the university's male status symbols she begins the painful process of discovering her true self. That is, of admitting that all she ever wanted was to be noticed, just like the rest of them, no matter what it took. It's a stinging indictment of America's celebrity and status obsessed culture, to be sure, but it's done in a very problematic way.
The main problem is that Charlotte ends up being the main target of Wolfe's vitriol, and in this he is no less misogynist, or less exploitative of her, than all the other main offenders in the book. If anything, he seems to be even crueler towards her for accepting and actually enjoying the status quo. That Charlotte is the best of all the female characters in the book just goes to show who Wolfe thinks is really to blame in the midst of all this moral lassitude. On the one hand, he cleverly recognizes that the girls are the key to the boy's successes: they need them and they need to sleep with them in order to brag about them and score points with the other boys. But on the other hand, he spits venom at Charlotte for even considering using this power and unrelentingly tortures her when she finally decides to use it. Why? Especially when the boys, though made to look like complete idiots many times, come off relatively clean in comparison to our heroine?
That question is never answered, along with a host of other questions one might have about why these kids act in this way. Ok, we understand that they are strongly compelled to behave like that, but, they don't really *have* to, especially the more intelligent ones, so why do they? And if Dupont merely encouraged Charlotte to reveal and accept her superficiality, where does it come from? At least Bret Easton Ellis (not exactly known for his profundity) hints at the dysfunctional families that created his social vampires in Rules of Attraction. But what motivates Charlotte to be so shallow? It's not her family, and it's not the attention bestowed upon her genius in her native Sparta. If anything, Wolfe already hints that Charlotte wanted to taste the forbidden fruits of petty notoriety in Sparta, she just didn't have the courage to do it. But why? Wolfe never explains it, and in the end, he undoes his deterministic fable of a `gone girl gone bad' because we discover that the `good girl' actually always wanted to be `bad'. Wolfe just tricked us for a while - as Charlotte tricked herself - by convincing us that Charlotte was actually interested in a `life of the mind'. But if Dupont didn't change her, if it merely pushed her superficiality to the fore, and if there is no personal or environmental explanation for her shallowness, then why bother to write a book with such a disagreeable central character?
And that is the main problem. Tom Wolfe's army of stereotypes is never credible as human beings, and Miss Charlotte Simmons in particular should be offended, if she weren't so one-dimensional of course, at her treatment at the hands of Mr. Wolfe. As it is, she is only there to prove a point: that Tom Wolfe is disgusted with the direction that American society is taking. Point taken, but if you are going to write a fictional book about it, shouldn't you at least bother to put some real characters into it?
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
See all Product Description
With an Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificate, you can get them what they want (even if you don't know what that is). 
Amazon Home