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Entertaining, but little payoff Tom Wolfe's new 700-page opus is an entertaining read. It moves quickly and keeps you turning pages. You may even laugh out loud on occasion and be reminded of similar situations/characters from your college days. Is this good literature? No. The book has too many faults to be considered "quality fiction." It is sub-par Tom Wolfe ... though sub-par Tom Wolfe is better than most of the drivel that gets published these days. Still, after following the trials and tribulations of our heroine for 700 pages, you wish the payoff at the end was better, which leaves the reader feeling gyped and pretty annoyed. Tom does a good job evoking campus life, though (and it's been a while since I've been in a university environment) it reads a bit extreme. The book though suffers most from lack of editing. Whole sections are overwritten (almost embarrassingly so) and extremely repetitive. The book would have benefited were it half as long. At any rate, I enjoyed it as I read it, but by its ending, I found myself asking why I'd bothered.