I Am Charlotte Simmons

By: Tom Wolfe

Narrated by: Dylan Baker

Length: 31 hrs and 43 mins

Publisher's summary

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, who has come here on full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.

As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite, her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's god-like basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turn 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.

With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the '00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.

©2004 Tom Wolfe (P)2004 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC

Critic reviews

• Audie Award Finalist, Fiction (unabridged), 2005

"Like everything Wolfe writes, I Am Charlotte Simmons grabs your interest at the outset and saps the desire to do anything else until you finish." (The New York Times Book Review)
"The book is brilliant, wicked, true, and, like everything Wolfe writes, thematically coherent, cunningly well plotted, and delightfully told." (Atlantic Monthly)

Dull Book

A repetitious boring unexciting piece of dull ordure. As Metcalfe a reviewer for Slate says: "By imagining college life as so debased, Wolfe must then imagine his heroine as correspondingly pure. Charlotte Simmons is a little mountain girl, a modern-day Walton, who has known in her life only hard study, dutiful but dirt poor parents, and the simple mountain ways of North Carolina. (And the novel hasn’t seen such a tediously guarded virginity since Richardson’s Pamela.) Well, that’s it for starters, Virginia."

At least Pamela is a character of her time a woman who fights against pretentious male virility of her time while Charlotte is a woman of no time; she never existed and never could exist. The males she fights against are pretentious in their grossness as President Trump. But we do live in a time of phony conservatism and Charlotte is the saint of that fraudulent apolitical movement.

Not his best . . .

This certainly is not Tom Wolfe's best work. The book is an overdrawn tale of the sexual exploits and sexual yearnings of college students. It trite and dull, and the story goes nowhere. And there certainly are no profound insights to be found in this silly tale. Wolfe seems amazed that college kids do things that were never done in his time on campus and he's busting at the seams to tell a tale about it.

Unnecessary vulgarity

I could not get past a few chapters of this book. I usually like Tom Wolfe, but his extensive use of vulgar language made me turn this book off.

Gomer Pyle Goes to College

The author should get rid of his Thesaurus and hire an editor, cut cut cut. 31 hours? He seems like he wants to impress with words rather than tell a good story.
Besides he graduated in 1951 from college why does he think he can capture today's youth? I think it's an old man's opinion of what the kids may be like today.
So if you liked Gomer Pyle USMC television show from the 60's you'll like Charlotte.

Wolfe's scoop isn't a scoop at all

If you graduated from college in the last 25 years, I Am Charlotte Simmons won't seem like much of a story. While older listeners might be fascinated by the slang, sex, and social dynamics, younger readers will not find anything new or intriguing. Wolfe does a good job capturing the environment on contemporary college campuses, but the characters are all tired clichés and the plot is yawn worthy.

Over the top description of college life

Tom Wolfe goes way over the top in his ultra stereotypical descriptions of characters. The stupid jock, the nerdy brains, the clueless, snobby rich girls. After a while it gets a little hard to take. The college life of these students is hard to believe has well. It's a long book filled with one sterotype after another, I just couldn't take it after about the first quarter of the book.

Not his best work

This book was disappointing - especially given how good Tom Wolfe's earlier books (Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities) were. This book was disjointed and trite. The young female protagonist is completely unbelievable - drawn evidently from a close reading of Jane Austen novels vs. any insight about how a naive but intelligent young woman would grapple with the challenges of college life in the 21st century.

Am I the only one?

I seem to be the only one who thinks this book really stinks. I'm upset that I wasted the CDs to burn it and my book balance to get it. I think Tom Wolfe has been out of college too long to be able to accurately write about life there. He disregarded one of the first rules of writing, which is, "Write what you know." My impression is that his research must have been limited to watching frat movies from the 80s. This thing just goes on and on. Be prepared to use the fast forward. Better yet, look for another selection.

Kind of excruciating

Charlotte is wholly unlikeable. A very silly and shallow “genius.” One gets the feeling that she will squander her natural talents and be very basic as an adult.

But the worst part is Mr. Wolfe’s dialogue, especially the slang he thinks young people use. It’s awful. I felt embarrassed for the narrator.

Charlotte was NOT believable.

After slogging through this meaningless tome, I realized how shallow Wolfe made his lead character. It was a poor and wrong characterization of a girl from rural North Carolina. In the end I was amazed that Wolfe completely left out the role of religion in such a persons life. It is extremely unlikely that Charlotte would have left Sparta without a religious thought in her head. Although Wolfe may be godless, rural Southerners rarely are. But he makes his character rather souless and not very sympathetic with almost no moral code of behavior. So Charlotte goes through her year in college with its very tedious situations and never once thinks to seek spiritual guidance of any kind. I'm not particularly religious, but I know people from my region and Charlotte Simmons rings very hollow. The book is a boring waste of time.