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I just finished Tom Wolfe's new(ish) "I Am Charlotte Simmons." I liked it, as an interesting interpretation of the modern college experience. And some of the characters were incredibly well-drawn and there were some fantastic moments. And, true to Wolfe form, he runs circles around modern grammatical use.
I only have a few complaints. Firstly, it ended far too abruptly, (but that's a problem I'm finding more and more, especially with authors like Wolfe and Maguire.) Secondly, seeing as I'm greek, the blatant anti-greek sentiment in the book was hard for me to swallow, but probably generally truthful in the end.
Lastly, and most frustrating, was how much I hated the main character (Charlotte, naturally.) When it comes to main characters, there has to be an element of love. I don't mean a romantic entanglement, I mean that we as readers need to empathize and care for the character. We can like them, or we can love to hate them, but there has to be some element of theirs to which we are attracted. Charlotte was incredibly well-written. She was, as all great characters are, flawed. But her flaws were just too great. I hated her. She was intelligent, but spiteful towards those less intelligent, wanted everyone to love her, but in turn, was hateful towards everyone, and incredibly judgemental. She used people, and even in the last two pages of the book, she almost admits she hasn't changed at all in that regard. It wasn't even fun to hate her as a character. She was the biggest disappointment in the whole novel, by far.
So, overall, it's an interesting character-study of the instution of college itself, but prepared to want to scream at the main character as you read it.
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Words of Wisdom:
If you could really get to know someone and know that they weren't lying to you, then you would know the world was real. Because you could agree on things, you could compare notes. That must be why people get married or make Art. So they'll be able to really know something and not go insane.
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