I Am Charlotte Simmons

De: Tom Wolfe

Narrado por: Dylan Baker

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

Reseñas de la Crítica

• 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)

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.

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.

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.