![]() ![]() EHīefore I Forget, by Andre Brink (VINTAGE £7.99 (312pp))Ĭhris Minnaar is a 78-year-old South African writer whose relationship with a young married sculptress, Rachel, gives shape and meaning to his declining years. Not every 75-year-old writer could capture how it feels for a young woman to brave a co-ed bathroom with only a new plaid dressing-gown for protection. But it's research enlivened by bold imaginative swoops. Wolfe's "Animal House" Bildungsroman runs the risk of reading like a slice of groovy sociology. As the book progresses, the three suitors are united by a sex scandal involving Lewinsky-style favours in gardens. Student factions are represented by Jojo Johansen, a basketball star Adam Gellin, a "dorky" journalist and Hoyt Thorpe, a "second generation snob". Her virginal air attracts male attention. "The whole campus was humid with it! Tumid with it! Lubricated with it!" Our guide through the hyped-up halls of residence is Charlotte Simmons, a pretty freshman from the Blue Ridge Mountains. "Sex! Sex! It was in the air like nitrogen and oxygen!" writes Wolfe with dandified abandon. Set in the well-manicured grounds of Dupont University, a fictional Ivy League campus in Pennsylvania, Wolfe's book describes a student body divided by class and race and driven by pheromones. His latest novel takes the campus novel in a new direction, giving the jocks as much air time as the leading lights of the English department. Every decade, Tom Wolfe trains his journalistic eye on a new of stratum of American society. ![]()
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