Sex & drink a dull girl.

I Am Charlotte Simmons By Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 676 pages, $28.95

When Tom Wolfe pens a novel (something that happens every decade or so), there are a couple of things you can count on. One: good, bad, or so-so, the book will vault onto the bestseller lists. Two: everyone will be expected to have an opinion on it.

Wolfe's latest opus, I Am Charlotte Simmons, doesn't buck this trend. The reason this novel, like his last several, has once again set Americans aflutter has much to do with Wolfe's view that incisive commentary on current-day society and politics is a central part of what an author should provide to readers. "A novel of psychological depth without social depth isn't worth an awful lot," as he puts it.

If this book has anything, it has social depth. Like its predecessors, Charlotte Simmons overflows with Wolfe's skillful explication of the class and status consciousness, manners, aim morals that are woven almost invisibly into the fabric of our "wild, bizarre, unpredictable hog-stomping Baroque country."

If Wolfe's novels could be said to make one overarching epic tale of America, then Charlotte Simmons is the chapter on the decadence of modern American college life. The novel chronicles the corruption (amidst much self deception) of Charlotte, the book's eponymous young heroine, within the responsibility free zone of a representative campus.

As with all of Wolfe's major characters, Charlotte is an exercise in journalistic hyperbole, archetypal in every way. She is brilliant, beautiful, and (most important to the plot of this tale of lost virtue), arch-traditional. She is hopelessly naive about the vulgarity of American life outside her tiny, backwoods hamlet of Sparta, North Carolina. And she is about to be ruined.

Charlotte's academic achievements (class valedictorian and a perfect 1600 on the SAT) net her a free-ride scholarship to the fictional Dupont University in Pennsylvania. The school, which lays claim in the novel to topping Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc. in the college rankings, seems to combine the elite air of an Ivy League institution with the atmosphere and athletic program of a big state school.