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)

Fascinating and funny

Wolfe's work is normally uneven and one always takes a chance with him. Charlotte Simmons is addictive, funny and a bit disturbing. His proses is wonderful and his observations are lethal. Way too much has been made of the sex in the book. If anything, it's an interruption, but nothing more. Much of the story isn't much different than college was in the 50's-60's when I attended. We always had our sex hounds, nerds, jocks and such. This is almost like a teen romance novel on grass (or beer) and one wonders what kind of nerd Wolfe was. I sustpect he's getting some of his frustrations worked out here. The reader is absolutely superb and he makes it worth the ride. If I were reading this thing, I'd have given up after about 100 pages.

Tedious

If it weren't for the delivery it would be an unbearable waste of time. He's lost it completely! Wolfe would benefit from an editor who should tell him to cut cut cut cut cut

I'm scared...

If this is an accurate depiction of college life today, remind me in a year when my son graduates from high school to save my tuition money and encourage him to find a trade! This is scary stuff! Never mind the horrendous language. I listened to this because my book club selected it, but I can't in good conscious recommend it to others. Call me a prude, but I found much of it offensive. Please tell me there is more to college life than what I found in this book!

Bad. Pain. Agony. It still haunts me. Sooooo bad

Stunningly bad. Amazingly bad. The narrator has made some extreme choices in giving voice to the characters; the majority of males come across as virtually drooling, brain damage victims, while other characters are inconceivably over-the-top and hackneyed stereotypes.

There is not a single likable character. Charlotte starts out appearing simply pathetic and weak, but ends up being pathetic and weak and devoid of character. The other main characters are all foul, distasteful people with no redeeming qualities.

I could not even begin to describe the agonizing pain of listening to this book. From the narrator who seemingly intentionally misinterpreted lines, intentions, and emotions, to the horrific repetition of completely unimportant and meaningless phrases and ideas in the text, to the never-ending use of deliberately obfuscated and ostentatious vocabulary. Try to count the number of times "insouciance" is used. It must be over 40. And, boy oh boy, you'll absolutely LOVE this book if you prefer to hear "optic chiasma" instead of "eye." It never occurred to me that you could write am entire book which frequently referred to visual organs, and only refer to them as "optic chiasma." Wow.

And, of course, maybe you'll love the part where Tom gets to show how charming he is by giving pages of different (but not really) definitions of certain four letter words. Ha ha! Your killing me... No, really.... Stop,... you're killing me.

I Am Charlotte Simmons

I have never felt compelled to review a book before now. Charlotte Simmons is long, tedious, boring and makes one ask "why did I listen to this". Thomas Wolfe thinks he is clever with his choice of words but uses words such as "insouciant" repetively until you start counting them. His names for sexual body parts are asinine. Avoid the full length version at all cost.

Disappointing

Silly story of shallow college life. After the wonderful Bonfire, this is truly a disappointment.

WAY OFF THE MARK

Wolfe has painted a portrait of such extremes it is hard to identify with even one pathetic character. Having worked in a University for more than 10 years I barely recognize these young people. And the narrator reads female character's lines like one big screech. I was looking forward to this read and could have tolerated its misinformed content as I love all of Wolfe's writings but between the oversimplification of young people and the narrator missing the right voice for the female characters it is a bomb.

No literary value

An indictment of university life and athletics, probably correct in nature but only as a generalization. I found the book to have no social value and terribly redundant. Mr. Wolf's excessive use of the "F" word was not necessary; his waste of time in the description of such things as a mucous wad, trash on the floor, clothes, and never ending emotions of his characters had me saying out loud more than once..."get one with it"! The basic story was a good one but he beat it to death with his redunancy. The conclusion after pages and pages of drama came so quickly and quietly I felt that I missed the funeral. He actually mangaged to end the story with a minimum of profanity...but thank God, he ended it.

Totally inauthentic

What would have made I Am Charlotte Simmons better?

I might not have hated this pointless and trite book and considered it amusing fluff if it weren't for the reader. Acknowledging that he is gifted in differentiating multiple characters with different voices, he just didn't have a clue what voice to give these characters to make them genuine. It didn't feel like the characters came alive, it felt like my grandmother was reading them, which made the dialogue of college students sound completely inauthentic. He reads the adults very well, but of the dozen young adult characters in the book, the central focus of the book, he didn't hit a single one of them. It was annoyingly distracting.

What was most disappointing about Tom Wolfe’s story?

If this is supposed to be some social commentary on the youth of today, it fails miserably by making every character a caricature, but an idealized caricature. Everyone is physically perfect, everyone is self-obsessed. That superficiality works in Bonfire of the Vanities. Not here. In "revealing" his characters' deepest fears, Wolfe just makes it glaringly obvious that he doesn't know his subject matter at all.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

I didn't want to give up on the book, you know, because it's Wolfe, and I assumed he would somehow save it if I gave it enough time. But now I'm just peeved that I'll never get the hours of my life back that I wasted listening to this.

Geesh. Really?

I'm not sure if it's the narration or what, but I was totally put off by this book.

That said, I bought it because it was a long book, which I needed in order to kill a long car trip, and it did that, at least.

Still, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone I actually liked, and it's not one I'll listen to more than once.