“I Am Charlotte Simmons” by Tom Wolfe (688 pages) was my first Wolfe novel.
I really loved it. I loved his writing. I loved how he would describe things — even though it could be quite lengthy at times. I loved how he wouldn’t dance around big issues.
I loved all these things, but the end of the book was a letdown. A BIG letdown. Wolfe spends more than 600 pages building everything up and then like 50 tying everything together. He should have taken a little more time and finished it right.
I really began to hate the main character, too.
I think I should started with some of his earlier stuff, because from what people have told me this book is nowhere near his other novels.
Back of the book:
Dupont 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. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.
As Charlotte encounters Dupont’s privileged elite–her roommate, Beverly, a 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 Turk 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.
15,000 pages ... 
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