The Globe covers the new Tom Wolfe book I am Charlotte Simmons in an article today. Apparently all the negative reviews don’t faze Wolfe. In response, Wolfe said mildly: ”I assume it’s just the way the book struck them. They just didn’t like it. How can you argue with that? To say ‘You did so like it?'” On why he wrote about college campus life: ”I didn’t approach the subject with the notion that I was going to write any sort of indictment,” Wolfe insisted. ”I had merely become so curious about college life. During the ’90s, when I was slaving away at ‘A Man in Full,’ I had begun to hear stories about coed dorms, about drinking, about political correctness. College had more and more replaced the church as the source of new values, of new ethical outlooks.” This is my favorite part of the article: “Wolfe said that while drinking is probably no more common on college campuses today than it was 50 years ago, the amount of casual sex, or ”hookups” in student parlance, has greatly increased.” He even went to frat parties for “research”. Oi.
Bookdwarf
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Bookdwarf 
I think Wolfe is the “Bill O’Reilly” of current novelists. He keeps insisting he doesn’t have an agenda when he ‘observes’ people for his books, but whenever i read his work his agenda comes through loud and clear. I had to laugh when he stated that in order to study today’s college students he went to a lot of frat parties. Now anyone with a brain would know that “frat houses” ceased to be a place to learn about traditional values sometime in the late 1960s. As in the case of Dubya, they are simply a stopping off place for over-privileged louts on their way to their slot in corporate america and wall street. As a writer, one might imagine Mr. Wolfe would have hung out with students involved in communications and the performing arts, but he is a notorious homophobe (sprinkling his past efforts with such sparkling terms such as “shirtlifters” and in one bizarre case claiming gays take over college dances and turn them “gay routs”. As a gay man who attended college in the swinging sixties, we wouldn’t have been caught dead at a college mixer, we were in NYC every weekend going to places that were gay to begin with, duh! 🙂 As to the demise in values, he might want to ask himself what the parents of those frat boys are doing in their spare time. Maybe the problem is they don’t have any time left from their work at the law firm and let their kids do what they please, writing a check to solve any and all problems that might be character building.
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