I just finished reading Tom Wolfe's latest, I Am Charlotte Simmons - probably never would have finished such a doorstop if I hadn't been flat on my back with some kind of flulike symptoms when I started it last night. Pretty entertaining, although not as good as I remember Bonfire of the Vanities being. Did you know Wolfe had a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale (according to the dust jacket bio)? Not sure what to think about that.
Charlotte Simmons is Wolfe's take on the American elite university experience, circa 2002, I suppose. There is certainly a lot in the scenery and personalities reminiscent of good ol' Duke (my undergrad alma mater) circa 1997. My only real beef with Wolfe's prose stylings, which, as I recall, were ripped in more than one review when the book came out, was that his fictional rappers do not come across as realistic. Wolfe reveals that he's unable to appreciate that rhyming about obscene acts does not have to sound obscene and can actually have poetic value; therefore he comes up with condescending, unsuccessfully parodic verses as a backdrop for some of the scenes in the novel.
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