I finished it last week and thought it was great. Bonfire of the Vanities is one of my favorite novels and this wasn't that good, but it was still great.
Tom Wolfe has a distinctive style and it is sometimes distracting, but the parts I liked best about the book without spoilng anything are:
the anti-achievement mentality where if you try in school you are not "cool" in some way;
the pecking order and structure of the fraternity/sorority types
the intolerance of the "diversity" crowd;
the athlete as celebrity complete with groupies and enablers phenomenon;
the immaturity of college students coupled with their absolute sense of infallibility and invincability.
I recommend the book as one look at our culture in 2005.
Correct. That is the point Wolfe made in his interviews. He's also commenting on the casual sex mentality. He said no one could get turned on by reading the sexual passages in the book. It's his attempt to show how shallow and meaningless it is amongst his characters.
Thanks for saying what I couldn't figure out how to say! I thought it was a very good book because it is written through the eyes, words, and thoughts of an extremely intelligent, extremely backwoodsy, naive 18-year old girl...who also has no clue that she is very attractive, too! That's why I thought Wolfe did a great job...he makes us see how she looks at life, how extraordinarily bright she is, and how she faces and changes during the course of her freshman year.
He was apparently pretty accurate, too, about how athletes are treated.
The book IS pretty layered, and is worth reading...but it may not appeal to some.
The dialogue is awful, and the collegiate "patois" (Wolfe's affected term) is stilted and unbelievable.