excellent read, fun for a college students. ( )

The book indicts American higher education as being shallow, booze-filled, purposeless, and filled with immorality, detailing the corruption of an intelligent, naive girl. The story is well-considered and mature. Its characters were well-developed, and they behaved in internally consistent ways. It's a little like a tragedy. Wolfe stretches all that is normally small into bigger and bigger proportions. The main character experiences a spiritual crisis and is both victim and perpetrator of cultural snobbery, i.e., morality is simply for the little people who fail to understand the complexities that are innate to human nature. She likes the guy she shouldn't. She can't like her intellectual equal. She gets hurt, so on and so forth, but the story isn't as clichéd as I make it sound. It's fleshy and new, interesting.

In the end, the novel is multi-layered. It's about higher education, but it's also simply about one girl (I don't say woman, because she isn't one) being startled by the absence of morality at her ivy league school. It's about the brilliance of a star growing dim. She cannot achieve without being constantly admired, so she settles for being liked instead of being good. She lacks moral judgement and courage.

Thumbs up from me. If you can stomach the copious amounts of sex, drinking, poor English, disrespect for all things beautiful, and general debauchery, then give it a go.

By the way, right now I don't feel like being all political and editorializing about the current lack of educating that goes on in schools but--I shall just say--it's not a baseless indictment. ( )

Didn't finish this- got almost half way through before growing too bored too continue - everything was dragged out, the stort and the scenes - far too much detail, although it didn't contribute much, far too much song lyrics and character thoughts interrupting the flow of each section. Similar to his other books in lots of ways, im unsure why this one just didnt work, because when i started it i loved it.

It seems odd that Tom Wolfe, would attempt to write the college story from a female perspective. However, his daughters have recently graduated from college so I suppose he was inspired by their stories. He seems to have gotten inside the female mind to a reasonable degree but there are nuances that he just doesn't seem to have gotten.

Charlotte Simmons, the eponymous heroine is from Sparta, North Carolina, an american small town. As class valedictorian and academic superstar, she is expected to go far, and is due to attend Ivy League Dupont university. She expects to meet her intellectual equals at Dupont, something which has eluded her so far in Sparta. However, she is disappointed to find that students are Dupont appear to be more obsessed with drinking, partying, making out and sports, than they appear to be with studying. Wolfe also highlights the importance of sports teams to the american university system.

The story in not told solely from the perspective of Charlotte Simmons. We also meet frat boy king Hoyt Thorpe who is determined to be remembered as a legend within his frat house and white basketball star Jojo Johansson who undergoes a seachange in his attitude to his studies.

I mainly like the character of Charlotte Simmons, though I did find her a little sanctimonius and overly naive at times. However, her growing attempts to fit in and be seen as popular will reverbate with lots of readers. The most endearing character in the book, as far as I'm concerned is Johansson, who is determine to move beyond the jock athlete stereotype.

The book is quite long, but it literally zips by due to Wolfe's pacy writing and I never once found it a chore. Critics of the book have said that it does not accurately reflect college life but I never once felt that it over exaggerating. It's a whirlwind tour of the college experience, but its a remarkable acheivement for a male writer to capture a female mind so well. ( )

Hilarious for the first third, the peters out. Seemed like he was in a rush to finish as if he realized, "oops, I'm up to 600 pages! Time to wrap it up."