Three decades ago, writer Tom Wolfe captured the excesses of the 1960s in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In the 1980s, he skewered the folly and emptiness of that decade in the great novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Now, in I Am Charlotte Simmons, he does the same for the early twenty-first century.

Wolfe?s novel covers some of the same ground as his previous book, Hooking Up. As the title suggests, part of that book dealt with the sexual mores of young Americans. Wolfe famously noted that, in the ?era of hooking up,? young people exchanged every possible body fluid before they exchanged names.

This hyper-sexual culture forms the backdrop to I Am Charlotte Simmons. In the book, Charlotte, a young woman with a Christian background, enters Dupont University, a stand-in for any of our most prestigious schools. There she discovers that nothing in her small-town North Carolina upbringing has prepared her for the world she faces.

The problem isn?t academic; it?s moral. Dupont is filled with students who, in their striving for academic and athletic excellence, have neglected what?s most important: excellence of character.

And that lack of character isn?t only a matter of sex, although that is where the moral cluelessness of Dupont?s students is most clearly displayed. It also shows up in their speech. Students who have aced the verbal portion of the SAT can scarcely utter a sentence without profanity?a verbal pattern that Wolfe reproduces with sometimes depressing fidelity.

Dupont?s amoral universe overcomes Charlotte?s Christian background. Though eventually she realizes how far she has fallen, it?s not before learning some very painful, humbling lessons.

Wolfe says that he didn?t write the novel ?with the notion that [he] was going to write any sort of indictment.? Instead, he was curious about contemporary college life. Especially since, as he put it, ?college had more and more replaced the church as the source of new values, of new ethical outlooks.?