Set in fictional Dupont University, it reaches down into America’s deep-fried soul and returns with an inflammatory portrait of the pornographic hollowness of that $120,000 investment known as college: all the drinking and partying, the cheating, screwing and athlete-worshipping. Using his trademark interior monologues, Wolfe shows that kids are ignorant because they have one thing on their mind: sex.The heroine is a naive overachiever from rural North Carolina repulsed by the vulgarity of the social scene. For most kids,it was just something that happened on TV.”Osama bin who? If you want to understand why even America’s young and well-educated are out of the loop, I am Charlotte Simmons will show you why in a scary way. This is the work in which they systematically defaced, with superimposed clown and puppy heads, one of the few remaining sets of Goya’s Disasters of War etchings, made from the artist’s original plates. In Laura Hopkins’ bold, imaginative design the shifts and eventual mergings are handled with a cool wit. An uncommonly compelling and sensitive Faustus, Scott Handy deliberates with a hushed intensity in a book-crammed study whose walls close in to become the white minimalist ambience of the Chapmans’ studio or a pristine modern-art gallery.There’s plenty of diabolic drollery in this version, as Marlowe’s hero fetches up, in the course of his travels, at an agonisingly fashionable Turner Prize bash, where there are no shortage of candidates (Critic equals Envy etc) for the Seven Deadly Sins. If we needed a reminder of how, well, pre-September 11 such concerns over life on campus seem, we need only look out of the window.
The view from Wolfe’s library stretches downtown over Central Park, across Midtown, and all the way to the former site of the World Trade Centre.I ask him whether, perhaps, the zeitgeist passed him by this time? “I did pause and say, you know, wait a minute,” says Wolfe, with the languid cadence of a born Southerner “This is supposedly changing everything But look at New York today Real estate is out of control.. Besides, I found on campuses the reaction to 9/11 was zero. Even Wolfe, who has made millions by telling us what the madding crowd is doing, acknowledges that America’s youth may have slipped a little. “I’m glad I didn’t know this before my kids went off to college,” he says with an uneasy chuckle.It’s an odd statement for America’s pre-eminent clocker of the zeitgeist, especially given the most contentious election in the nation’s history. Over the next 90 minutes, here in the city Wolfe painted as a concrete jungle in his 1987 blockbuster The Bonfire of the Vanities, the surface of these decanters remains calm, still and unbroken.
Visit Wolfe and it becomes easy to understand why life on American university campuses was a distant reality for him And a shocking one, too. The walls support shelf after shelf of books on Flemish masters and modern painters, and portraits of Wolfe’s daughter in full equestrian gear. Shortly after the writer makes his entrance, a smiling housekeeper follows with two glasses of water. Sitting cross-legged on a gold couch in the library of his Upper East Side apartment, wearing the trademark white suit, navy tie and two-tone spats, Tom Wolfe is about as far from a college keg party as one can be in the US On the table before him stands a statuette of Chairman Mao.
Orion has already leapt in with an instant “affectionate biography” by Mick Wall, due out on 25 November.. Kolb uncovered the plot while working for the Department of Homeland Security.
* Do the British love a modest winner more than a plucky loser, or vice versa? We’ll soon find out. In early December, Virgin Books will publish Kelly Holmes’s account of Athens 2004. My Olympic Ten Days will offer “her thoughts, hopes and fears” as she progressed to her double gold on the track. Just a few days earlier, Paula Radcliffe’s My Story So Far will have arrived from Simon & Schuster.* When John Peel died, his memoirs remained unfinished, though it’s not yet clear how unfinished. It’s possible that the ever-conscientious Peel was up to schedule and had left a detailed outline. Transworld, who paid close to £1.5m, had planned to publish next autumn, with delivery pencilled in for early 2005.
Thiago Soares is an exuberant Orion, jumping and snarling with gusto This Sylvia is lovingly restored, brightly danced.. Penguin US is poised to announce further details of a book by Larry J Kolb, author of The Reluctant Spy. The publisher is hinting at a thwarted plot to disrupt the elections that has seen one arrest and others under investigation. The plotters in question are described as “rogue CIA agents with long ties to the Republican National Committee”, who concocted a scheme to create the impression of a trail of financial contributions from al-Qa’ida directly to “a high-ranking Kerry official”.
