I Am Charlotte Simmons
Was very happy to finish this book. It wasn't horribly bad, but it certainly wasn't very good. Slate magazine has a review that pretty much sums up my feelings about it:
This is an eminently foolish book, by an old man for whom the life of the young has become a grotesque but tantalizing rumor. It is overdrawn, overlong, underconsidered, and filled with at least one forehead-slapping ay caramba per page. (That adds up to 676, by the way. This is the predictable doorstop, perfectly timed for seasonal gifting.) At one point I wrote in its margins, The stupidity here may actually be boundless. And yet ... and yet ... I kinda liked I Am Charlotte Simmons, ripe for the pyre as it is. I'm glad we have three days here, to help discover how this unsacred monster, with its raft of insecurities and no social graces to speak of, holds some inexplicable power to ... well, not charm, exactly. Transfix? Going in, there's one thing you can say about Tom Wolfe: At least he's no worse than Tom Wolfe. About Wolfe's preposterous claims regarding the novel as a genre, I'll have more to say in the next couple of days. But his disdain for the overly literary is a real boon to his reviewers. The prose rates a perfect 10 for ease of use; and so, long as this book is, you glide right through it without a hitch. Wolfe will occasionally flash the Nabokovian smile—the shrubbery at Wolfe's made-up Dupont University is "euonymus," its cafeteria bathroom emits an "egestive funk"—but mostly he writes in a fat novel, book-of-the-month style, totally uninfected by modernity