![]() ![]() “It was like like you had just arrived from Mars It’s like you came here with clear eyes, and you see things exactly as they are.” Alternately seduced and repelled by the brash tenor of student life, Charlotte is the lens through which all of college culture can be viewed. On the campus of the fictional Dupont University, somewhere in Pennsylvania, she might as well be from another planet: “You’re not just a freshman,” one character tells her. In the middle of this hedonistic hubbub is Charlotte Simmons, a hard-working, intellectually curious, undeniably beautiful girl from rural North Carolina. The irony - alternately hilarious and horrifying - is that academia, at least this side of it, is decidedly nonacademic, more concerned with sports, sex, and alcohol than with classes and ideas. By this virtue I Am Charlotte Simmons is funnier and far more amusing than most other academic novels and surely applicable to a wider audience, since more of the reading public have been students than teachers. ![]() Tom Wolfe’s much-ballyhooed new doorstop, I Am Charlotte Simmons, is as much an academic novel as any other set on an American university, but the white-suited man of American letters has hit upon a satirical and commercial mother lode: Instead of depicting the scholarly realm from the perspective of professors slaving in obscure fields and battling for tenure, Wolfe documents university life from the students’ point of view. ![]()
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