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Favorable
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PopMatters Stephen M. Deusner
More than a trifle but less than a masterpiece, the novel is an entertainment, and as such it seeks first to amuse and second to inform.
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Favorable
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Wall Street Journal Harvey C. Mansfield
Social satire is everywhere evident, but there is a sober theme, too, and it is very much worth paying attention to.
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Favorable
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The Independent Cal McCrystal
So this novel is both an excoriation and a lament. It is a good read, cleverly constructed.
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Mixed
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Washington Post Michael Dirda
So: sermon, melodrama, dystopian vision -- I Am Charlotte Simmons partakes of all these, and does so stunningly. But it's still as much polemic as novel. One closes the book feeling soiled by its cloacal vision and emotionally manipulated by its author.
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Mixed
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Chicago Tribune Julia Keller
The novel is overgrown (676 pages) and galumphing and flawed but basically good-hearted, which is to say that it resembles the very adolescents the author tries to paint in this novel.
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Mixed
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Publishers Weekly
Wolfe's promising setup never leads to a deeper contemplation of race, sex or general hierarchies. Instead, there is a virtual recitation of facts, albeit colorful ones, with little social insight beyond the broadly obvious. [8 Nov 2004, p.35]
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Mixed
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Salon Priya Jain
The only real novelty in "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is that it was written by someone as removed from the college scene as Tom Wolfe. In the details of the scenery, we're glad to have his stranger's eyes, rendering sharp observations about things we've seen perhaps too often to really notice.... But Wolfe's big revelations -- that college is really all about sex, and that prudery rarely survives social pressure -- are anything but.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph George Walden
There is plenty of entertainment, but the emphasis on Charlotte's inner torment is such that we sometimes feel she is a pill, whose dominance of the novel inhibits Wolfe's humour.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Lewis Jones
If it shares some Dickensian virtues, such as exuberant, lovingly crafted grotesquery, it also has Dickensian vices, such as long-windedness, and a fundamentally unbelievable heroine.
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Mixed
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LA Weekly Brendan Bernhard
For most readers Simmons will stand or fall on whether they find reading 676 pages about contemporary college life, in all its drunken, sex-crazed, nerdy and frat-boy manifestations, worth their time. After all, you need only to watch five minutes of MTV Spring Break to get the general idea.
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Mixed
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Los Angeles Times Francine Prose
Of course, to remark that Wolfe's characters seem a bit broad and cartoonish is rather like complaining that Balzac's characters seem preoccupied with money. But too many false notes and nagging questions of authenticity can pull us out from the novel just when we are most engrossed. [7 Nov 2004, p.R3]
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Mixed
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The Economist
Mr Wolfe's gifts for sartorial detail, verbal tics and all the tiny gestures that define place in the social pecking order are on hyperkinetic, at times tiresome, display.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Book Review Jacob Weisberg
Like everything Wolfe writes, ''I Am Charlotte Simmons'' grabs your interest at the outset and saps the desire to do anything else until you finish. That said, it is by far the weakest of his novels.
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Mixed
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The Onion A.V. Club Noel Murray
It's shocking how much of Charlotte Simmons is inelegantly written.... But Charlotte Simmons is far from the washout some have made it out to be.
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Unfavorable
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The Spectator Sam Leith
His pages throng with -- sometimes entertainingly, sometimes tediously -- burlesqued but recognisable types. He tells us what we already know, but tells us it more loudly.
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Unfavorable
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Village Voice Joy Press
With I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe continues the painful process of eroding his hard-earned reputation as a cultural arbiter.
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Unfavorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Lynn Crosbie
The problem is that Wolfe, whose writing has always been grossly adjectival and chic-specific, has failed to capture any news of interest about American youth, and comes off instead like one of those horrible professors who tried to make you listen to Imagine while simultaneously getting off on his status as a pedagogical errant. [4 Dec 2004, p.D6]
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Unfavorable
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The Guardian Blake Morrison
He tells us little or nothing we didn't already know.
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Unfavorable
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Boston Globe Richard Eder
The proportion of rant overload to silky observation has much increased.
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Unfavorable
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San Francisco Chronicle David Kipen
The book defies credibility, taste and the remotest semblance of subtlety.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Though Mr. Wolfe tries to gussy things up with his hyperventilated prose and a noisy arsenal of narrative bells and whistles, most of his observations will be overwhelmingly familiar to anyone who has been to college, sent children to college or gone to the movies.
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Unfavorable
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Houston Chronicle Nora Seton
What's missing is a real experience. When Wolfe does chance to sentimentalize or search a character, the moment feels lumpy and awkward.
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Terrible
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London Review Of Books Theo Tait
Bloody awful.... Charlotte Simmons resembles a very bad Oliver Stone film. Unfortunately, at 676 pages, it lasts considerably longer.
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Terrible
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Chicago Sun-Times Henry Kisor
A painfully disappointing novel.
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Terrible
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Christian Science Monitor Ron Charles
This isn't the anthropology of the Ordinary - a potentially revelatory approach; it's just a dramatization of clichés.
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Terrible
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Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Far, far too much of the book is propped up by the author's harrumphing-Humberty shock.
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Terrible
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New York Review Of Books Daniel Mendelsohn
A failure it is: bloated, schematic, heavy-handed, and, it must be said, boring; impotent in its attempts to suggest a lived reality... and, oddest of all, flaccid as social satire.
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