I Am Charlotte Simmons — Tom Wolfe
Is this guy still writing books? Well, I can see why. I Am Charlotte Simmons was published in 2004 when he was 73 years old. It’s a story set in contemporary American college life. It matches well my own university experience of ten years ago, and for the most part it reads as completely real.
The novel itself deals mostly with social anxiety, and the effects of the urge to be accepted. It tells this story through the character of Charlotte Simmons, a brilliant but naive small-town girl who’s just arrived on scholarship to prestigious Dupont University, a clearly veiled stand-in for Harvard or Yale or other famous Ivy-league schools. She’s smart as hell, but ends up spending most of her energy trying to be accepted socially, especially by boys.
Meanwhile, the basketball players live in a different world entirely from the students they supposedly represent, the frat boys are convinced that they own the world, and the actual intellectuals wear geeky shirts and bitterly resent the popular kids that they secretly admire.
It all goes on for 700 pages, and it works.
Holy shit. A septagenarian is believably deconstructing modern teenagers. This gives me great hope for my old age.
