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It was thus that, in his eighth decade, Tom Wolfe swapped his white suit for a less conspicuous blue blazer and set out on a tour of college campuses in search of Charlotte Simmons. "I went to fraternity parties," he recalls. "Very few of the students had any idea who I was. I was so old, and I always wore a necktie--I must have seemed somewhat odd to them." He trekked from Stanford to Ann Arbor, from Chapel Hill to the University of Florida in Gainesville. "The most valuable things were having people tell you about things like sex. I didn't see any," he adds hastily. What he did see was a kind of boot camp where teenagers are initiated into the social matrices of sex and power against the autumnal backdrop of what Wolfe describes as "the gradual--maybe not so gradual--disappearance of conventional morality."
So who, exactly, is Charlotte Simmons? Wolfe's heroine is a freshman at prestigious, fictional Dupont University in Philadelphia. They don't come much fresher than Charlotte. A native of tiny, remote Sparta, N.C., the brilliant, virginal Charlotte arrives at Dupont full of dewy ambition, expecting to live "a life of the mind." Instead, she encounters charming, predatory frat boys like the handsome Hoyt Thorpe; jock demigods like basketball star Jojo Johanssen; and icy prep-school snobs like her roommate, the bitchy Groton grad Beverly. Instead of an ivory tower, she finds a status-obsessed, intellectually bankrupt sexual romper room. Will she hold to her ideals or be dragged down into the beer-soaked mud?
I Am Charlotte Simmons isn't like Wolfe's other novels. For one thing, he sticks largely to one setting, the Dupont campus--he's not doing his city-hopping, class-transcending billion-footed-beast act, which is impressive but gave his earlier books a certain overstuffed lumpiness. Charlotte Simmons adheres more to the Aristotelian unities--time, place and action--and thus hangs together more neatly. It's a much more personal novel than the earlier ones. Not unlike Wolfe, Charlotte is a permanent outsider, a lonely observer. Wolfe's books are usually more about setting than character, but Charlotte's delicately drawn highs and lows give the book an unexpectedly tender heart. "I went through a bout of depression myself," he says, "and that's why I felt I knew exactly how she would feel. As I look back on it, there's a lot of me in Charlotte."
No one can read Charlotte Simmons without picking nits. There was a time when Wolfe was a pioneer, reporting back to straight America from the exotic island of radical youth culture in books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, but nowadays American culture and youth culture are basically the same thing, and it's Wolfe who looks a little behind the times. He leans heavily on catchphrases from such movies as Swingers ("You're money, baby") to give his dialogue a contemporary vibe. There are missteps: What self- respecting black hoopster would say of a Caucasian opponent, however stalwart, "That white boy's got heart"? And are college kids really still into 90210 and Animal House? They certainly don't have PlayStation3s, as such a machine does not, at press time, exist. Sometimes Wolfe has the air of a benevolent, fastidious Martian, as when he expends several sentences explaining the nature and function of what we humans call a StairMaster.