The genius of Wolfe's novel is that it pursues Charlotte's demise in a darkly comic manner, thereby carrying the reader for some seven hundred pages. (2) Within this debased environment-a reductive one that presupposes a lack of validity inherent in individual experience-Charlotte will lose her virginity at a beer-soaked fraternity formal, experience acute clinical depression, nearly flunk out of school, and prepare to enter her second semester paralyzed by a hyperactive, normalizing consciousness of social status. She finds, too, a campus run by faculty members who largely separate themselves into competing deterministic camps, a split occurring along a sciences/humanities dichotomy: first, there are the behaviorists, who speculate that there may be no free will, that genetics and the pressures of one's environment may hold the key to the entirety of human experience and second, there are the Theorists, who raise anti-foundationalism to a foundational level, who make of relativism, Relativism. What she finds at Dupont, however, are fellow students almost exclusively of privileged backgrounds whose concerns alternate between greed, substance abuse, and casual sex. She commences her undergraduate career hoping to begin a process of lifelong learning that will facilitate her transcendence of a quotidian upbringing. Charlotte is a brilliant and chaste eighteen-year-old who hails from Sparta, North Carolina, a town tucked deep within the Blue Ridge Mountains, whose economic lifeblood is the production of Christmas trees. (1) Armed with his considerable stylistic repertoire, then, as well as a commitment to journalistic evidentiary grounding, Wolfe pursues in the novel the realistic representation of his heroine Charlotte Simmons's first semester at the prestigious Dupont University. In several pre-and post-publication interviews, Wolfe speaks of having conducted observational research at college campuses across the United States-Stanford University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, among them-to gather and verify Charlotte Simmons's material. Perhaps more importantly, Charlotte Simmons is a novel buttressed by the sort of pre-composition reportage through which Wolfe has traditionally established authorial ethos and expertise.

Tom Wolfe's most recent book, I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), is a campus novel replete with the kind of literary pyrotechnics for which Wolfe has long been famous-the point-of-view shifts the extended and extensive use of dialogue to establish both scene and subjectivities of characters and the liberal use of quirky punctuation, to include rampant ellipses, colons, italics, and exclamation points.

I am charlotte simmons writer