books by tom wolfe discussed
in this essay:
I Am Charlotte Simmons
HarperCollins (2004)
676 pp., $37.95
Hooking Up
Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2000)
293 pp., $35
A Man in Full
Bantam Books (1998)
704 pp., $23 (paperback)
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Bantam Books (1987)
656 pp., $23 (paperback
Jojo Johanssen is an all-American kid. One of the college students in Tom Wolfe’s new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Jojo plays hoops for Dupont, a fictional Ivy League school with the top basketball team in the nation. At six-foot ten-inches and 250 pounds, he has decent height. He is also bulked up through the biceps and triceps, his shoulders swollen with trapezius muscles the size of cantaloupes. No blushing giant, Jojo wears gear designed to show off those “traps, lats, delts, pecs, abs, and obliques in glossy high definition.” Though not ripped like the some of the black players—they boast “chocolate brown skin bulged with muscle on top of muscle”—he’s still pretty buff.
