I Am Frustrated With Charlotte Simmons

Finished Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons" today. 600-plus pages read since Christmas Day (it was a holiday gift). A good read ... but I was really disappointed with the ending. Wolfe's characters are always so amoral. Does the man have any hope for humanity? Probably not, since he gleefully has one professor trash the concept of a "soul" -- the "ghost in the machine" -- and reveal that there is something even more nihilistic than Marxism. And do 18-year-olds really contemplate such body features as the "amygdala"?

This book irritates me ... because it reveals the intrinsic superficiality, not only of my generation, Generation Y with its cell phones, hookups, instant messages, instant everything, but with humanity in general. Yet it also irritates me because it led me to care about the characters, to develop feelings for them, which I admit is the mark of a successful writer, the kind I wish to become. Grrr...