Wolfe suggested it depicts the American university today at a fictional college that is "Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, and a few other places all rolled into one.

As Charlotte prepares to say goodbye to her family and leave for college, an event happens at Dupont that will play an important role in her future.

He is struggling to keep his position because the school recently recruited an up-and-coming black freshman player, and the coach wants to bench Jojo in his senior year.

Adam writes for the college's independent newspaper and is a member of the "Millennial Mutants," a group of like-minded intellectuals who oppose the anti-intellectualism and class snobbery they see in their fellow students.

He also tells Charlotte he knows that Adam Gellin has begun investigating the incident and how, at the behest of the governor a large Wall Street firm has offered Hoyt a high-paying entry-level job in exchange for his silence.

She is further humiliated when she returns to campus and discovers that Hoyt's seduction and rejection has been made public via two girls Charlotte had previously befriended.

Jojo, who treats Adam as beneath him socially, denies the plagiarism charge and protects the athletic department's perversion of the athlete/tutor program from being exposed.

Jerome Quat, Jojo's professor, confronts Adam about the plagiarized paper and shows sympathy toward him in a college dominated by students obsessed with sports and sex.

The novel centers on Charlotte, a naive new student at Dupont University, a school boasting a top-ranked basketball program and an Ivy League academic reputation.

The student culture is focused upon gaining material wealth, physical pleasure, and a well-placed social status; academics are only important insofar as they help achieve these goals.

Besides college life, athletics, and youth sex culture, another major theme that also began in Hooking Up is Tom Wolfe's interest in neuroscience, specifically the relationship between brain chemistry and free will.

In the context of the book, questions of free will are posed by the characters' various dramas as Charlotte decides whether or not she will adopt the sexual norms of campus life and Johanssen attempts to become a better student and more disciplined person generally.

But after three thick novels and a novella (surely he will never write a short story), the issue remains: Why does a writer whose ambitions are so fundamentally journalistic insist on processing his reportage into fiction?

"[4] London-based Literary Review gave Wolfe its 2004 Bad Sex in Fiction Award, an "honor" established "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel", for his writing in I Am Charlotte Simmons.

[7] In 2005, the film rights to I Am Charlotte Simmons were purchased by Trilogy Entertainment, with co-founder John Watson producing and writing the screenplay.