I Am Charlotte Simmons
by Tom Wolfe
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 688 pp., $28.95

TOM WOLFE is America's greatest living novelist. Kind of. Lord knows, he's got the tools. Is there any author who understands the social meaning of clothes, cars, glasses, words--even the way that people sit and stand--better than Wolfe? Is there any reporter who knows how to make a lightning prose zip in and out of characters' minds better than he does? Is there anybody, writer or not, more in love with the "wild, bizarre, unpredictable hog-stomping Baroque country" that is the United States?

Not really. With his latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe has produced a satisfying if slightly old-fashioned story of a young person's education and growth--"old-fashioned" referring here only to the kind of book Wolfe has written, since in previous bildungsromane, from The Sorrows of Young Werther all the way down to Stover at Yale, you won't find either Tom Wolfe's trademark prose or the details of oral sex, coed toilets, more oral sex, and occasional classwork that he discovered on America's college campuses. I Am Charlotte Simmons takes the theme that romance died the day easy sex was born, which Wolfe chronicled in his 2000 collection of essays, Hooking Up, and splays it like a honeytrap across a girl's path as she tries to travel from an evangelical childhood, isolated in a town called Sparta way back up in the North Carolina hill country, to an Ivy League education at the fictional Dupont University.

The eponymous heroine Charlotte Simmons may imagine her scholarship to Dupont will show her the life of the mind, but it's the life of the party she soon discovers college is about. She becomes interested in neuropsychology and does well in class--at first, that is. But then she meets Adam, a nerd who writes for a campus paper, and Jojo, the school's sole Caucasian basketball star, and Hoyt, the preppy fraternity brother and big man on campus.

As in every novel about undergraduates, the adults come off poorly. That's how it's supposed to be in such books, and the teachers, coaches, administrators, and visiting speakers in I Am Charlotte Simmons are all on the make, in one way or another.

But Wolfe doesn't let the children off, either. They are really at school to be socialized, the author realizes, and the posturings, connivings, seductions, pseudo-adulteries, and struggles for social dominance are all practice for adulthood.

The plotlines of the self-deceiving Charlotte's three suitors begin to draw together when Hoyt punches out the bodyguard of California's governor. The governor is a rising conservative political star who is on campus to give a speech--and he is, naturally, receiving oral sex from a coed as Hoyt stumbles upon him. Skinny little Adam wants to use the story to make his name as a muckraking journalist, but Adam has his own troubles, since his work-study job, tutoring the basketball team, seduced him into writing a term paper for Jojo, and the scandal is starting to dribble out. Bringing all this home in the story's conclusion, the author shows he's solved the plot-construction problems that weakened the endings of his first two novels, Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full. With I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe has produced a solid, well-reported page-turner.