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.