And The Right Stuff became one of my favorite books of all time. Despite being more "masculine" in style than most things I like, it was just so powerful and evocative - and history! - and I loved it.
But Wolfe's social commentary fiction? Not so much. Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy Bonfire of the Vanities or A Man in Full. Because I did. But man, Wolfe can come off as so judgmental. It can be a little much.
Which brings me to I am Charlotte Simmons. I was afraid of this book, b/c Wolfe spent a semester at Stanford while I was there, walking around in his white suit and clearly researching such important terms as "hooking up" and "dormcest." And even though talking heads kept comparing his fictional Dupont College to Duke, I knew that it had a whole lot of Stanford in there. And I wasn't in the mood to be judged. Not on my alma mater.
And speaking of my alma mater, I felt as though Wolfe laid me totally bare within 10 pages, when a drunken frat boy expounds on the "exaltation" of being recognized as a Dupont student:
Everyone, male or female, who was right now, as he was, in the undergraduate division, Dupont College, or had ever graduated from Dupont College knew that feeling, treasured that feeling, sought one way or another to enjoy that feeling daily if at all possible, now and for the rest of his life - yet nobody had ever captured that feeling in words, and God knows no Dupont man, or Dupont woman, for that matter, had ever tried to describe it out loud to a living soul, not even to others within this charming aristocracy. They weren't fools, after all.
And that's it exactly.
I was able to forgive the plot implausibilities and fixation on the word "rutting" and annoying self-pity throughout the rest of the novel (which is a fun read btw, in a very longguilty pleasure sort of way) because Wolfe had captured that feeling so completely.
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