I Am Charlotte Simmons in Around the World in 80 Books

Jan 01, 2009 Nanosynergy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-2000-2019, reviewed, american, 2009read

A book desperate for a brutal editor. Within this overly-long, repetitive, and inconsistent tome is the kernel of a possibly very good book and perhaps even a statement about the Ought years college experience and generation. But alas, the great author does a painful belly flop. Many of the characters are engaging and even memorable, but even they cannot save this rambling story written by someone who displays just how out of touch he is with this generation. He may have been a first-hand observ ...more

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Aug 04, 2013 silly_soup rated it it was ok

Shelves: novels

This book was interesting through the first 150ish pages,when it seemed like a story about an anomalous and singularly virtuous mountain girl invading the chaotic world of the 21st century university. I believe that is the premise that Wolfe was going for, but the 550ish pages that depict Charlotte's freshman year experience at the fictional Dupont University are tedious and uncompelling.

Whereas Wolfe began the story by introducing a shy but brilliant girl from Appalachia as she graduated from t This book was interesting through the first 150ish pages,when it seemed like a story about an anomalous and singularly virtuous mountain girl invading the chaotic world of the 21st century university. I believe that is the premise that Wolfe was going for, but the 550ish pages that depict Charlotte's freshman year experience at the fictional Dupont University are tedious and uncompelling.

Whereas Wolfe began the story by introducing a shy but brilliant girl from Appalachia as she graduated from the social desert of high school, the development of all other characters (barring one, the one representing the 'student-athlete' stereotype) that appear after her arrival at college was so shallow, so vapid, and so lacking in connection to deeper psychology that it became quickly evident that there are no sympathetic characters in the story. Once Charlotte arrives at Dupont and begins to adjust (clumsily and not very convincingly, in terms of how one would imagine a smart but sheltered girl navigating a fictional Ivy League school), she becomes the most displeasing of all the characters. Most of them start out as annoying and later prove themselves to be not just that, but also selfish and delusional. Charlotte transitions from symbolizing naive (and frankly, unrealistic) virtue into the most confused and frustrating character of them all. On top of that, rather than presenting the characters as unfortunate products of their shallow collegiate environment, Wolfe seems to be saying that collegians, who have no real self-knowledge or restraint or good sense, are sadly misguided and completely self-serving as a whole once they enter the college environment. Which may have been his point, but I personally am not convinced that his portrayal is anything more than a warped and misanthropic view of people between adolescence and adulthood.

There are a ton of other general issues I have with the book -- all the characters are really caricatures is the #1 problem, imo, but the generalization of higher education culture rolled into a fictional university is really skewed, I believe. Same goes for portrayals of various social and cultural groups, under-developed allusions, and a non-rigorous application of the passage of time (i.e. very fragmented and questionable depictions of individual and relationship developments over time.)

Tldr; long and annoying book with shallow characters reacting to their own delusions in an unconvincing Ivy League environment. ...more

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