released 1/22/2009
When Tom Wolfe’s novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, was originally published in 2004, most of the reviews concentrated on the story’s sexual escapades. The book was received by social conservatives as an indictment of collegiate promiscuity and dismissed by progressives as a tired and embarrassing display of peephole prurience by a once-vital writer now in his grumpy 70s. Mickey Craig and Jon Fennell argue that sexual confusion is simply a symptom of a larger crisis prominently explored in the book. “The novel invites us to ask: Is love possible in the age of neuroscience? Or have we unmasked human beings only to discover that love is an illusion?”
This essay is featured courtesy of The New Atlantis, where it was originally published in Fall 1995. It is read by Ken Myers.
38 minutes
PREVIEW