Charlotte's desire to belong with the cool crowd gets her drunk and in bed with a fraternity brother named Hoyt. In the weeks Charlotte hung around Hoyt she thought his smile and the way he touched her meant there was actual love behind the frat boy's lust. She gives up her virginity only to find she was nothing more than a conquest, an "accomplishment" to tell his fraternity brothers.

Charlotte forsook her mother's morals. Her punishment was her loss of innocence and a crushing guilt. This takes her into a depression which causes her grades to plummet which creates a vicious cycle. Without her school newspaper reporter friend/Rhodes Scholar wannabe Adam holding her in the night in his apartment and scolding her to get to her finals Charlotte wouldn't have passed anything. The tender, compassionate, accurate display of her depression was the most emotional, moving writing on the subject since Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon.

I won't give the ending away. I will tell you that on the surface it's a happy ending. Charlotte may be more comfortable at Dupont, but her life is a far cry from the ideal she had at the beginning of the school year. Charlotte may have thought she wanted a "life of the mind," but belonging won out.

Any accomplished novelist could set a story on a modern college campus. But when you read Tom Wolfe you expect more. The reporting as fiction (A.K.A. The New Journalism), the melding of high-level ideas like neuroscience and sociobiology, and the social satire place Wolfe a step above other novelists. But what makes Wolfe Wolfe is the zig-zag, BANG! ZAP! rat-tat-tat-tat style wordslinging. He is one of the few fiction writers who can rip off a paragraph that fills an entire page without the reader pausing. Sentences crackle, letters fly over you. Through it all Wolfe makes sure his novel doesn't fall into a postmodern morass. The plot moves forward, and the characters remain living, breathing creatures.