Parents who are not ostriches ought to read Tom Wolfe's latest (and in my opinion, greatest) novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons."With full flourish, Wolfe trains his arsenal of talents on college life. It is comic anthropology -- hilarious, satirical, and gluttonous to devour the many inanities of undergraduate tribal life. All of that is good Tom Wolfe fun. But there is also a not quite explicit preachiness in the novel that isn't typical Wolfe. It's not hip, it's even earnest, and it's being ripped apart by the critics.
The essential pathology that Wolfe aims at from many angles is this: a promiscuity that precludes love. With lurid detail, he paints pictures of hormones revved up by the steroids of porn-lite pop culture; sex enhanced by anonymity and erased by any hint of romance; sex as consummation of coolness, of not deigning to be so geeky as to care or commit or show passion about anything; a narcissistic but whorish obsession with bodies and grooming by both sexes; girls who service men, who've ceded to men their ancient powers; the absence of any kind of idealism, morality, ambition, religion or romanticism that, in Western culture at least, sometimes preserved words like "soul" and "heart" and "love" from the omnipresent forces of lust, liquor, narcotics, status and cruelty.
You see why parents might want to read this novel? Perhaps with their children, those 15 and up I'd say.
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