Tom Wolfe's "I am Charlotte Simmons"

I read the excerpt in Rolling Stone a couple months ago and thought it was really awful. It read like something the "smart" frat kid would write in his intro to creative writing class except maybe slightly more eloquent. In other words, Wolfe seems to have gone to great lengths of research in order to semi-competently give us a superficial picture of college life today.

Surely you mean "I am Easily Amazed"
http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_11_14_fafblog_archive.html

Slate did one of their e-mail discussions on this book:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2109579/entry/2109749/

One of the writers liked it, the other didn't.

Has Tom Wolfe ever actually written anything good? I really liked The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Bonfire of the Vanities as an early teen, but a few years ago I reread EKAAT and was appalled at how terrible it was, and I think if I reread BotV I might have the same reaction.

The Right Stuff is really good. Should be read.

I read BotV as a teen and hated it. But I was young, and thought that you should finish any book you start. (I'm not sure why I thought that, and I'm glad I got over it.)

people STILL to this day start off articles about tom wolfe in some approximation of a tom wolfe style. it must be too hard to resist or something. With the exclamation points and all caps and the like.

"http://slate.msn.com/id/2109579/entry/2109749/

One of the writers liked it, the other didn't. "

Um, I'm not sure where you got that idea -- it seemed pretty clear to me that they both hated it.

hurtingchief, i'm with o nate about the slate discussion - virginia heffernan seemed to like it (she says so pretty clearly in her last posting) and the other guy, whose name i can't remember, totally hated it. I haven't read it, and though I read his first two novels, I don't think I intend to. Something about his books leaves me dissatisfied and annoyed and, as so often happen, James Wood articulated for me why. In an excellent essay that I can't find online, he writes,

"Tom Wolfe's novels are placards of simplicity . His characters are capable of experiencing only one feeling at a time; they are advertisements for the self: Greed! Fear! Hate! Love! Misery! The people who phosphoresce thus are nothing like real people. They are instead big, vivid blots of typology: The Overweening Property Developer! His Divorced First Wife! His Sexy Young Trophy Wife!... They race through huge, twisted plots, their adventures hammered out in banging and brassy prose.
"What is so curious is that Wolfe thinks his fiction is realistic..."

He was recently on the Daily Show, and he came off as someone who didn't have a clue what he was talking about. But I think he had a fine time researching it.

I saw that too, and, um, he was talking about co-habitating, how amazed he was that young people were living together without being married, and I thought, why would some so obviously aware of how out of touch he is with young people, try to write a novel from that p.o.v.? Aside from being able to be an old man asking dirty questions to 18/19 y.o. ladies.

I never got why of all things, monogamous co-habitating would bother older conservatives so much. Isn't living the life of a bachelor worse to them?

Here's that Daily Show interview:

http://www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/thedailyshowwithjonstewart/videos_celeb.jhtml

He does come across as being out of touch but at least he's trying not to be.

Well, yes, but does that mean he should write an enormous book on the subject? I mean, maybe it does. But his tone is very "well did you KNOW that" about things which seem very, very obvious to me. So I can only assume his book has that same quality.

"Well, yes, but does that mean he should write an enormous book on the subject? I mean, maybe it does."

I don't see why not -if it's what really interests him then he should go for it. And at least he's trying to understand the culture we live in.

"But his tone is very "well did you KNOW that" about things which seem very, very obvious to me. So I can only assume his book has that same quality."

Actually he doesn't come across that way in the book (which is very good IMO though I'm only one third of the way through) though there are some cringeworthy moments. But he hits far more than he misses.

Sorry, that last paragraph wasn't very well constructed. Here's a hopefully better version:

Actually he doesn't come across that way in the book, which is very good IMO though I'm only one third of the way through. It does have some cringeworthy moments but, overall, he hits far more than he misses.

This finally came out in paper-back. It's strange how much it mirrors the structure of Bonfire. I've read one thrid of it an dI don't really know what to think of it. Cringeworthy definitely, entertaining maybe.