I am Still Tom Wolfe

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Wolfe does not thunder in I Am Charlotte Simmons. He allows us to be as shocked or as blase as we want to be about the anonymous campus couplings he describes. "In my mind, it's just what's there," he says. "I must say, I pride myself on the fact that I don't think anybody can find a political agenda, a moral agenda. I insist that I am objective." Up to a point, that is — he'll bend the truth for the sake of a good line. "I had a groupie at the end deliver what I thought was a quite cogent remark," he recalls. "'Every girl wants to f___ a star. Every girl.' My daughter said, 'Nobody talks like that, Dad.'" This time his grin is a little lupine. "But I left it in."

I Am Charlotte Simmons will get attention for the smutty scenes, of which there are a generous but judicious number (he considered and then omitted a scene involving what he nicely terms, in his courtly Virginia accent, a "gang bang"). But Wolfe's interest is not prurient. His real subject is the nature of identity, of the individual soul (Charlotte's in particular), and whether or not it can survive uncorrupted in the acid storm of sex and alcohol and power and peer pressure into which we ritually plunge our young in the name of higher education. The answer he arrives at is not simple. Some get their comeuppance in Charlotte Simmons, and some are redeemed, but Charlotte's fate is a surprise, and not everybody will find it a pleasant one. Wolfe may be getting old, but he's not getting soft.