Book summary

In Tom Wolfe's morality tale, his innocent heroine, Charlotte Simmons, is an earnest freshman at the fictional Dupont University. Charlotte is shocked by the campus goings-on--sex, drugs, rock & roll, and worse--and by the amoral, high-living students she encounters: her roommate is a snooty rich girl with no morals, and (in a graphically described scene) Charlotte loses her virginity to a caddish heartbreaker. A sexual scandal and a sports scandal concentrate the plot, as Charlotte endures a series of trials, at the end of which she emerges older, wiser, and in control. Wolfe's novel takes place entirely on the college campus, and most of the characters are students in a work that is quite different from his last novels--and one that is, inevitably, seen as a tour de force by a 74-year-old writer whose college days are far behind him and who has created, for the first time, a female heroine. A New York Times Notable Book for 2004.

Media reviews

"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....[A] rich, wise, absorbing and irresistible novel. Wolfe does things with words--exhilarating, intoxicating, impossible things--that no other writer can do....I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS will get attention for the smutty scenes, of which there are a generous but judicious number...But Wolfe's interest is not prurient. His real subject is the nature of identity, of the individual soul (Charlotte's in particular), and whether or not it can survive uncorrupted in the acid storm of sex and alcohol and power and peer pressure into which we ritually plunge our young in the name of higher education. The answer he arrives at is not simple. Some get their comeuppance in Charlotte Simmons, and some are redeemed, but Charlotte's fate is a surprise, and not everybody will find it a pleasant one. Wolfe may be getting old, but he's not getting soft."