was the obvious choice, but I thought it was possible that someone else might have sold out Hoyt Thorp. The only mystery in this novel was finding out who the 'source inside the St Ray house' was. The storyline of JoJo Johanssen was one of the more interesting ones I did cheer him on. Her need to compete with the other girls was startling, and her total lack of any female bonding represented a serious developmental flaw in her character.

Her self-consciousness was really painful. I don't understand why she became such a conformist in college she really should have been past the conformity-prone years by that time. Smart girls do stupid things and bitchy girls do bitchy things.Ībsolutely nothing shocking here just young people being young people.Ĭharlotte Simmons herself is a bit of a cipher, maybe. Good students find themselves being challenged by their class assignments.

The clothes, music, language and technology is all different, yes, but the fundamentals remain the same.įreshmen struggle with the transition from high school and home to college courses and dorm life. It has been 30 years since I started college, and in those years, nothing has fundamentally changed. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust 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 godlike 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. 2005 Audie Award FinalistAmerica's 'peerless observer' ('People') uncovers college life-from jocks to mutants, dormcest to tailgating-plus race, class, sex, and basketball 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.

I am charlotte simmons writer