Inspiration - Rated 
I want to say that I really enjoyed the book. But there is something that the book gave me, more than any self help book or similar...
It was the part where so often Charlotte would say to herself and remind herself, that "she is Charlotte Simons", and that she would prevail and surpass the obstacles she finds along the way, just as we all do in everyday life.
When a person picks up the book and looks at the title, they wonder, what the heck does this title mean? Well, it means a lot. I have the thought she has said aloud many times in my head, but with my own name "I am....." and it reminds me of who I am and what I have achieved.
A very quick long book - Rated
Despite being over 600 pages, this book draws you rapidly into the world Wolfe has created and pulls you to the end. It's focus is on the characters rather than the plot to begin with, but they are all so clearly drawn that you can see them clearly and actually want to know what happens to them, even if nothing actually happens.
There are four main characters. Three are male university students - a charismatic alpha-male, a nerd, and an athlete. They intersect via the title character, Charlotte Simmons, a very bright 18 year-old from a small mountain town who wins a scholarship to a top US college. Different plot strands are set in motion and, through Charlotte trying to find her place at university (and in the world), become intertwined over around ten months and have a major impact on all their lives. The most complex character is Charlotte. Everyone else is to a certain extent a charicature, but one of the themes of the book is about how the dynamics of university student society is how it forces students into certain clearly defined categories and act in the way prescribed for these groups. Charlotte is more interesting in that she has no real idea about these different groups to begin with and is pulled in a lot of contradictory directions and her actions and thoughts are often clearly at variance. I'm still puzzling over Charlotte, particularly the ending, and that's a good sign; she is one of the most stimulating characters in literature I have come across in a long while.
The student world is seen through the minds of a wide cast of characters and their thoughts and actions are left to stand by themselves for the reader to make any value judgments about. The author's observations are more concerned with the use of language, in particular the different student "patois". One nice touch is reporting speech straight but breaking off to explain the subtleties of pronunciation.
A certain amount of pages is given over to brief biographical sketches of the characters, showing their upbringing and so on. This is interesting in itself but not strictly necessary as he sketches the characters well the moment the appear. There is also no seeming reason why some characters have these detailed notes and others don't as some with mere walk-on parts get them and other more important characters do not. This is a book written by someone who knows he'll be published and so doesn't have to grab anyone's attention immediately. I think the book actually benefits from that.
Overall, the book feels very realistic. Anyone who has been at university will recognise much in it, and see themselves reflected in the characters - although the US system and experience is very different to that of the UK. Thoroughly enjoyable and with a lot of throught-provoking ideas about self-identity.
Awesome as always - Rated 
Tom Wolfe is my favourite writer in the world today. They say Americans don't understand irony; Tom Wolfe certainly does. Awesome as always!
Not a fan of the ladies - Rated 
I picked up Tom Wolfe's new novel, I am Charlotte Simmons, with a high degree of expectation. After all, Wolfe is a brilliant writer and his `social realism' manifesto is very sympathetic to me, no matter how many of his contemporaries insist in dismissing him as `just' a journalist. But I have to admit that the alarm bells started ringing around page 3, when Wolfe describes a faux biological experience that, basically, tells you *exactly* how the whole book is going to turn out. Now as a reader, I can only think of two reasons why an author would do this: a) you are about to read a `tour de force', which makes the author confident enough to let you know how it's going to be since the very beginning; or b) you are in for a rant. And in this case, I was in for a 700 page long rant. On the plus side, Wolfe is angry, and he is not afraid to show it, which provides the reader with wonderful set pieces dripping with sarcasm, vivid and brilliantly written tableaux of college life, and a stinging indictment of America's moral turpitude. But on the other hand, you are also in for one of the most manipulative, cruel, and disgusted books that you will ever read - especially concerning its main protagonist.
Charlotte Simmons is not a human being; she is not even a caricature, like the rest of the characters that people Wolfe's large canvas (the necessary downside of Wolfe's ambitious social realism); she is an instrument, and nothing more. Whatever inner-life she has (if you can even call it that) is there to serve the author's purpose. She doesn't so much grow or change during the novel, she merely reveals herself. And what she reveals is not pretty. Nor is it pretty to realize that her apparent innocence was just a gimmick used by Wolfe to serve his initial objective: to introduce a virtual alien into Dupont (what else can you call a girl like Charlotte, who appears to have been born and bred in a mountain cocoon) to get the kind of disgusted reaction that Wolfe wants to express.
But that's the main problem: her initial reactions aren't really hers (at least not in the sense that they represent her true self, as we discover later), they're the ones she was conditioned to have before her true nature breaks through the thin veil of purity that was instilled in her as a child. Dupont didn't make Charlotte shallow and superficial: she was already like that in her little mountain hamlet of Sparta. It's just that she was convinced that the best way to get attention was to study and be intelligent, to live a life of the mind, as she puts it, and that university would provide her with the opportunity to shine even brighter in that respect. When Charlotte discovers that to get noticed at Dupont you basically have to be good looking and available to sleep with the university's male status symbols she begins the painful process of discovering her true self. That is, of admitting that all she ever wanted was to be noticed, just like the rest of them, no matter what it took. It's a stinging indictment of America's celebrity and status obsessed culture, to be sure, but it's done in a very problematic way.
The main problem is that Charlotte ends up being the main target of Wolfe's vitriol, and in this he is no less misogynist, or less exploitative of her, than all the other main offenders in the book. If anything, he seems to be even crueler towards her for accepting and actually enjoying the status quo. That Charlotte is the best of all the female characters in the book just goes to show who Wolfe thinks is really to blame in the midst of all this moral lassitude. On the one hand, he cleverly recognizes that the girls are the key to the boy's successes: they need them and they need to sleep with them in order to brag about them and score points with the other boys. But on the other hand, he spits venom at Charlotte for even considering using this power and unrelentingly tortures her when she finally decides to use it. Why? Especially when the boys, though made to look like complete idiots many times, come off relatively clean in comparison to our heroine?
That question is never answered, along with a host of other questions one might have about why these kids act in this way. Ok, we understand that they are strongly compelled to behave like that, but, they don't really *have* to, especially the more intelligent ones, so why do they? And if Dupont merely encouraged Charlotte to reveal and accept her superficiality, where does it come from? At least Bret Easton Ellis (not exactly known for his profundity) hints at the dysfunctional families that created his social vampires in Rules of Attraction. But what motivates Charlotte to be so shallow? It's not her family, and it's not the attention bestowed upon her genius in her native Sparta. If anything, Wolfe already hints that Charlotte wanted to taste the forbidden fruits of petty notoriety in Sparta, she just didn't have the courage to do it. But why? Wolfe never explains it, and in the end, he undoes his deterministic fable of a `gone girl gone bad' because we discover that the `good girl' actually always wanted to be `bad'. Wolfe just tricked us for a while - as Charlotte tricked herself - by convincing us that Charlotte was actually interested in a `life of the mind'. But if Dupont didn't change her, if it merely pushed her superficiality to the fore, and if there is no personal or environmental explanation for her shallowness, then why bother to write a book with such a disagreeable central character?
And that is the main problem. Tom Wolfe's army of stereotypes is never credible as human beings, and Miss Charlotte Simmons in particular should be offended, if she weren't so one-dimensional of course, at her treatment at the hands of Mr. Wolfe. As it is, she is only there to prove a point: that Tom Wolfe is disgusted with the direction that American society is taking. Point taken, but if you are going to write a fictional book about it, shouldn't you at least bother to put some real characters into it?
I am... not that impressed - Rated 
There is no denying Tom Wolfe's capacity for writing deepy compelling fiction with modern relevance, but I would complain that his narrative structure is becoming a little formulaic. You could draw a graph to map the similaraties between 'Bonfire of the Vanities', 'Man in Full' and this, his tale of American college campus promiscuity and superficiality. Each draws together a disparate cast of narrators, many of whom veer towards cartoonish stereotype, towards a semi-farcical denouement. Whereas his use of multiple perspectives once seemed highly dynamic and mobile, it is starting to feel clumsy and laboured. From the pea-brained 'student-athlete' and the embittered nerd, to the left-wing professor and the ball-breaking basketball coach, it is all a bit too categoric, too neatly representative to be brilliant satire.
Wolfe, as proponent of New Journalism, is expert at identifying and exposing an area of modern cultural decline, but can be lazily sketchy when it comes to his protagonists. Only the central character, the eponymous Charlotte, is a genuine bundle of contradictions - detestably fickle to the final pages - one moment haughty and snobby, the next moment a desperate sycohpant. You may not like or identify with this characterisation, but more crucially you may find youself questioning its veracity.
Moreover, Wolfe's been praised by some for his ear (or eye?) for youth culture, but some of his fictional pop references are cringingly embarassing: 'Dr Dis' anyone? Similarly cringing is the pseudo-intellectual musings of Adam Gellin's 'Milennial Mutants', although this is probably intentional. Wolfe is a master of dialogue though, even if he feels compelled to translate it all in italics throughout the book. Nevertheless, this a highly entertaining read, not many authors can make 600 pages pass so quickly.
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