High-fidelity storytelling, brilliant and vivid
Written: Jan 01 '05 (Updated Jan 01 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Superior depth of character, convincing plot, setting and situations. Completely delightful.
Cons: Wish it didn't have to end.
The Bottom Line: It's a must-read. As engaging and entertaining a read as anything Wolfe has written- and that's saying a lot.
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| gregfokker's Full Review: Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons |
Tom Wolfe's latest is a portrait of contemporary college life told from the perspective of vastly distinct yet utterly compelling characters. Having completed my first degree 14 years ago, My Name is Charlotte Simmons evoked a rush of memories, the bad as well as the good, but more than that, many thoughts and feelings I had experienced during my first year away from home.
The hallmark of all Wolfe's work is a conspiratorially unaffected narration, inviting the reader to listen to the whisperings of an irreverent, incisively witty co-conspirator. He captures the dialect and dialectic of yet another generation, getting completely into the heads of his many characters and playing them off each other. Charlotte Simmons is a prodigy from the town of Sparta in the Blue Mountains of North Carolina, off for her freshman year at Dupont College. Jojo Johanssen is on Dupont's basketball team, 7 feet tall and a "playa" almost through-and-through. Hoyt Thorpe is a frat boy in his senior year, while Adam Gellin is a reporter for the school paper, a Dostoevski-esque intellectual aspiring to greatness and to be disabused of his own virginity. They are surrounded by a detailed landscape of secondary characters, providing the reader with the experience of almost being on campus him/herself.
While the story centers on Charlotte Simmons' trials, inspirations, aspirations and tribulations, Wolfe gets sufficiently into the heads of each character to create strong tension and suspense. Like life itself, the plot that pulls these characters together is more the effect of their characters themselves. By applying his sharp eye and mellifluous voice to describing the characters, their vocabularies, ethnic and social backgrounds, styles and paradigms, Wolfe allows the plot to "just happen" as the living characters manifest themselves.
Unlike A Man in Full, Wolfe devotes this novel almost entirely to a single world, Dupont College. Whereas he described and brought together wildly divergent characters in different situations and different geographies, in Simmons he allows himself the luxury of focusing on a single place and time. The result is far greater depth and resonance of both character and setting, as he's freed from having to constantly reestablish the context. As always, Wolfe maintains the detached-yet-conspiratorial anthropological perspective that so lights up his earlier non-fiction and more recent novels.
While the characters themselves are occasionally glorious, occasionally disappointing and even occasionally disgusting in their words, deeds and attitudes, Wolfe's loyalty is clearly to the truth that he perceives. His unapologetic reporting is what sets Wolfe apart from and above other novelists. Whether it's classified as fiction or non-fiction, Wolfe's work is true and obviously strives to be so. Charlotte Simmons is convincing from the minute details to the grand sweep.
I laughed out loud several times, thought of several friends and relatives who will be particularly delighted by different passages, and couldn't put it down. It took only a few days to complete the 600+ pages, and I'm now feeling homesick for the story in which Wolfe has allowed me to live for these past few days. But, as with all of his other books, I now perceive a bit more and catch myself thinking in terms of his imagery and the vocabulary. Tom Wolfe has once again shown us a different side of being, feeling and thinking young.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
gregfokker
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Location: Montreal
Reviews written: 40
Trusted by: 2 members
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