First off, I hope everyone's close to finishing. Here are a few questions I thought it'd be interesting to explore, regarding the text.
1. Did this remind anyone else of Penn? Of certain frat houses at Penn? Of certain people at Penn? I feel like it must be a universal college thing, but it's still strange how it's set so close to Philadelphia and is SO reminiscent of Penn. I forget what the main walk through campus is called, but it sounded suspiciously like Locust Walk to me. =)
2. What do you think were Wolfe's main critiques of our generation?
3. How do you feel about where Charlotte ended up? How she got there? Is she an admirable character, despicable, realistic, etc.?
4. If anyone else had read any other Tom Wolfe (whose most popular work is most likely The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), how do you think this compares?
So, let's do this!
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Dupont definitely reminded me of Penn... although I have to admit I was a bit offended at one point in the book where Charlotte says that Penn was her safety school (humph!). I'm trying to remember the name of that main walk, but I thought exactly the same thing about it! The students described in the book reminded me of little pockets of the Penn community, although I don't think we get quite so excited about our sports :-P Adam's group made me think of Mike McCullough and the Philomathean Society, and being unfortunate enough to not have spent Freshman year in Hill, my roommates and my relationship with pretty much all of them made me think of Charlotte's roommate *sigh -- some bittersweet memories there, I suppose.
I don't know if I would say that Wolfe was making a critique of our generation, even though much of the writing took a critical slant, so much as reporting everything from a very 'realist' perspective -- no rose-colored glasses or euphemisms. He printed exactly the thoughts going on in his character's minds, the types of thoughts that we wouldn't usually express out loud without censoring to some degree. Maybe one critique would be that we uphold higher education as this amazing accomplishment and have some amount of respect for those who complete it, but really they're just as sleazy as the rest of the world :-\
I think that Charlotte's character at the end of the book is somewhat admirable, in that she gets herself out of the mess she created for herself, but she still has the same flaw that brought her down in the first place, which is that her main source of happiness is the approval and acceptance of others. I suppose that might be the main critique of our generation -- that the fear of social rejection and the temptation of 'popularity' hold too much power over our actions.
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