I am currently voraciously reading Tom Wolfe’s new book, I Am Charlotte Simmons. The author – pictured above in his trademark white suit – is famous for books like Bonfire of the Vanities and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I've been itching to read it for a while and luckily I grabbed a copy of the almost seven hundred page book for $9.00 at Indigo.

The novel centers around a small town girl with brown hair and striking blue eyes, who ends up getting a full scholarship to a prestigious Ivy League university, and plans on majoring in French Literature (hmm... sound familiar to anyone?) Anyway, despite the fictional Dupont University's elite status, Charlotte, the main character, learns that sex, alcohol, and social standings rule the campus, not academics.

Whereas Wolfe tackled 80's greed in Bonfire of the Vanities, I Am Charlotte Simmons satirizes the hallowed halls of academia. After experiencing four years of dorm life, I can relate to much of the craziness Wolfe writes about. Lord knows I remember leaving my door open one night and watching a very drunk young man, crawling on the floor, clad only in boxers, attempting to drink a bottle of Listerine because he ran out of booze. Yikes.

That being said, I'm enjoying the book but I do have some issues with it. For instance, many of the characters are one dimensional exaggerations: the bitchy roommate from hell, the testosterone-pumped frat boy, the geek, and even Charlotte as the naive country girl. Wolfe my man, I think we've seen many of those characters before. In fact most of them are plain unlikeable, with the exception of Charlotte and Jojo, a white basketball player who enjoys reading Flaubert's, Madame Bovary. I am aware that the novel is a satire but the characters don't have to be flat to prove a point.

There are also some cultural inconsistencies, most likely due to the fact that Wolfe is a seventy-four year old man trying to write from the point of view of today's college kids. Meaning that while he is generally dead-on in describing how kids talk and act, some terms he uses will sound archaic or just plain out of place. In Wolfe's world, jocks play Playstation 3 (um, last I checked it wasn't out yet), university students are actually listening to Britney Spears (without having violent reactions), and I find it hard to believe that even though Charlotte lives in a small town, she's never heard of, let alone read, Cosmopolitan Magazine (then again, maybe that's a good thing...).

Despite those small issues I have so far, I Am Charlotte Simmons is a fun read and an important example of a zeitgeist of 21st century campus life.

Go to Tom Wolfe's website here.