I Am Charlotte Simmons

Rating:
Summary: SUPERB READING OF A LANDMARK STORY
Review: Dylan Baker has been hailed as one of today's finest voice performers, and rightly so. His ability to inhabit the persona of male or female, old or young is uncanny. Baker's mastery of the spoken word is evident in all of his readings, and especially so in "I Am Charlotte Simmons," the story of a naive young woman suddenly thrust into a world she has never known.

How does one describe the release of a new work by Tom Wolfe? It's an event, an eagerly awaited occasion and, in this case, a triumph. In preparation for his story of Charlotte Simmons Mr. Wolfe visited numerous campuses throughout the country, talking, listening, observing with his telling eye for nuance and detail. Of this experience he has said, "....I went to a lot of fraternity parties, and this is where age comes in. Most people had absolutely no idea who I was, I was just this old guy at the party. I was too old to be a drug enforcement agent, so I was not a threat. That worked very well...In my mind anyway this is both the story of a young woman in a difficult, new environment and also a depiction of the American University today."

Of course, that is precisely what this story is about, but no one could write it as has Mr. Wolfe. Charlotte leaves her small Blue Ridge Mountain town believing that as a freshman at Dupont University she will expand her mind, increase her mental acuity. She is both brilliant and beautiful. But rather than finding young people with similar lofty goals she meets wealthy, blase students much more interested in sex, beer, and drugs.

In an unfamiliar environment, longing to be accepted, Charlotte soon finds herself abandoning her lofty ideals in order to be a part of this intriguing new life. That's far from the end of her story, but you should hear it from beginning to end in the words of Tom Wolfe as read by Dylan Baker.

Sure to be compared to Mr. Wolfe's groundbreaking "The Bonfire of the Vanities," "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is one more sterling achievement by one of America's foremost writers.

- Gail Cooke