Peeping Tom

In case you're wondering, I did finish reading Tom Wolfe's latest book, "I am Charlotte Simmons". It stinks. He should have called it, "I am Peeping Tom Wolfe". It's a wank from start to finish.

On his website, this novel is described as a "much-anticipated triumph by America's master chronicler immortalizing the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed college life of the '00s". Hardly. If you ask me, this book chronicles a senior citizen's creepy obsession with the sex lives of young people. At the end, Wolfe has a dumpy, tenured relic of a professor force a moral reckoning upon the characters but it's a weak attempt to give the novel a point. The "Man in White" is lost in the revels of self-indulgence. It's kind of sad but fascinating in a train wreck kind of way. As an aside I found it interesting that Wolfe and Bush are great fans of one another. Figures. They'd make quite a duo at a karaoke night club.

Excerpt from page 270:

" The machine, called a StairMaster, allowed you to run — if you could really call it running — without taking your feet off a pair of huge pedals. It was a bit like standing up and "pumping" on a bicycle. There were many girls...Some wore plain, sexless gym clothes, T-shirts, sweatshirts, running shorts, and sneakers. More, however, came dressed as...girls. Super-low-cut sweatpants they had! And short T-shirts! And lots of nubile young flesh and belly buttons in between! From the back...was he seeing a little buttocks décolletage, a little cleavage...Right in front of Adam, a girl with long blond hair pumped away on the StairMaster in low-waisted lavender nylon running shorts and an abbreviated, royal blue basketball jersey. She didn't have large breasts, but with each rotation her nipples pressed out against the thin nylon of the halter, and her belly button winked this way and that in the long expanse of bare flesh. Four machines down the row, a girl wore black tights, which gripped every curve and crevice of her loins like a second skin, and a flesh-colored athletic bra. The tops of her breasts bobbed up and down like flan. You have to look twice to make sure she had on any bra at all. The sight aroused Adam. His own loins were on the qui vive, as if something were about to...happen in this so-called fitness center...The push of a button, the flick of a switch...and they would stop pretending anymore and plunge into a full-blown rout, an out-and-out orgy, and rutrutrutrutrut..."

Obviously, it's ol' Tom who's rutrutrutrutruting.




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