As overwrought as this book is, it contains exciting glimpses of the modern college experience. Despite the fundementally unappealing portrayl, I felt proud to point out the parts of my "glory days" that I recognized on the page. Perhaps even more poignant were the glimpses of the painful trial by fire each of our "little pond" personas had to go through when tested against the anonymity and hive-mind of college. ( )

I really wanted to enjoy this novel because I've been a big fan of Tom Wolfe's writing for a long time. In fact, "Bonfire of the Vanities" remains one of my favorite books; I worked on Wall Street during the 1980s and he absolutely nailed the air of hubris and self-absorption that pervaded the time and place. Similarly, I found "A Man in Full" to be a really perceptive fictional treatment of life in the 1990s. Unfortunately, Wolfe misses badly with this expose of college life in the new millennium.

I had two main problems with this novel. First, while still a keen observer of social interactions, the author's "big picture" insights are hardly bold or new. Basically, Wolfe builds his story around the following observations: (1) college students like to drink and have sex, (2) student bodies are stratified along economic, racial, and class lines, (3) most college athletes aren't particularly good students, and (4) sometimes professors act out of self-interest. Perhaps I'm too familiar with the subject--I teach at a university somewhat similar to the one described in the book--but I suspect that anyone who has ever been to college will not be shocked or entertained by these revelations.

My second problem with the world Wolfe creates is that not one of the characters is remotely likeable or even particularly interesting. As other readers have noted, Charlotte is portrayed as naïve to the point of being unbelievable. More fundamentally, though, the way she turns her back on everything and everyone she stands for in the span of a few short months makes her very hard to root for. Most of the others--JoJo, Hoyt, Beverly, Adam--are one-dimensional and come off as mere cartoons. Sadly, after finishing the book, I couldn't think of a single character whose story was compelling enough to redeem the experience of having slogged through almost 700 pages.

I'm still a fan of Tom Wolfe, but after this book I won't automatically buy and read his next one. ( )

excellent read, fun for a college students. ( )

Je n'ai pas pu le finir, tant j'étais écœurée par la corruption affichée du monde étudiant américain, je pense que la traduction n'a pas aidé ! ( )

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. ( )