The Dupont University at which she arrives has been clearly modeled on Duke-though removed to the countryside of Pennsylvania, which gives the book an oddly O’Haraesque note. Charlotte leaves Sparta without a single decent pair of jeans but armed with this intellectual and moral inheritance and with a sense that she will return either with her shield of Athena or on it. Charlotte is ingenuous, but no mere ingénue-nature gave her a perfect SAT score of 1600, and she has been nurtured by the demanding, supportive love of a strong mother, a silent father, and an inspiring teacher. The novel’s eponymous hero is a wholly admirable girl from a poor family in a small mountain town in North Carolina called Sparta. and I can say with assurance that nothing about Dupont rings true.” “I have never been a Wall Street banker or an Atlanta real-estate developer,” wrote Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun, “so I must take the accuracy of Mr. serves up the revelation-yikes!-that students crave sex and beer, love to party, wear casual clothes, and use four-letter words.”įor others, the very familiarity of Wolfe’s subject matter breeds contempt. She had expected, she wrote, a grand Tom Wolfe panorama of “big-city racial politics, big-business financial shenanigans, or big-time criminal justice.” Instead, she continued in high sarcasm, Wolfe has taken on “the momentous subject of college life (college life? Yes, college life!), and.

Thus, the chief gripe of those who dislike I Am Charlotte Simmons is that it is not sufficiently “Wolfean.” Michiko Kakutani’s reaction in the New York Times was typical. More than any writer of our time, Wolfe has also created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed, for which he is again being punished.

Though I Am Charlotte Simmons is not without its defenders, its detractors have been numerous and petulant. He must be surprised, then, that his latest novel-of-the-decade, I Am Charlotte Simmons-genial, trustful, sympathetic-has already created as much ill will as his earlier waspish commentaries on fashionable politics, art, and social pretension. In his long career, Tom Wolfe has written more pages in order to épater les bien-pensants than any writer now alive.

I am charlotte simmons writer tom