Wolfe enrolls.

I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 688 pp., $28.95)

AT fictional Dupont University, the setting for Tom Wolfe's new book, a top-ranked basketball program complements an Ivy League academic reputation. As the ill-educated but clever coach puts it, the university upholds the classical ideal of mens sana in corpore sano, a phrase he identifies as Greek and translates roughly into English as, "If you want a great university, you damn well better have a great athletic program."

In this rollicking novel set in the carnival atmosphere of today's elite colleges, athletic culture is pervasive, as is the preoccupation with sex, alcohol, and perfect abs. Dupont is a place where the desires for physical pleasure, reputation, and future success smother the life of the mind; a world where student life is insuperably at cross-purposes with academic life. Which is to say: It's a pretty accurate picture of student life at today's elite colleges.

Ever the sharp-witted iconoclast, Wolfe has never been popular in certain literary circles. His November 1 proclamation, in a Guardian interview, that America's liberal elite "hasn't got a clue" was perhaps not the best PR strategy for the new book; the reviews generally have been smugly dismissive. Among the many objections, perhaps the strangest is that Wolfe fails to capture faculty culture--when he set out to write the book specifically from the perspective of a college student. Charlotte Simmons is a sheltered and naive, if intellectually ambitious, southern teenager--and is therefore the appropriate vehicle through which Wolfe can communicate the shocking resurgence of the luridities of the late Roman empire in today's American academe.

The book has also been reviled as juvenile voyeurism, with Wolfe himself labeled a Peeping Tom; and his characters have been derided as unconvincing caricatures. The book does dwell on sex, or at least on characters' thinking and talking about sex, and Wolfe is not one to spare us descriptive detail. The characters are indeed exaggerated, but that's to be expected in a satire. The problem with the criticisms is that they are themselves abstractions and caricatures. They work only so long as we leave out Wolfe's remarkably capacious power of description, his insatiable appetite for bringing the entire physical setting of every scene into his story--whether it's his depiction of the grandeur of the college's Gothic architecture, or Charlotte's first experience in a co-ed bathroom, or Dupont's president wondering about "the look" of one of his Sixties-throwback faculty members: "Look at him in his Lenin goatee, his shapeless, baggy, unpressed khaki pants and a grim grey sweater so tight it hugged every fold and flop of flab of his upper body . . . What is this look, this getup, supposed to represent? His aloofness from the Neckties and Dark Blue Suits (such as the President was wearing) who still run the world? His solidarity with rebelling youth (if any)? Or just a simple eternal adolescent bohemian poke in the eye?"

As for the novel's randiness, it must be noted that sex is accorded the exact same level of importance in the book that it actually has in college life. Wolfe accurately and hilariously captures, for example, the all-too-common dorm-life phenomenon of being "sexiled"--kicked out of one's room for hours, days, or weeks while a roommate "hooks up" with what David Brooks, in his more dispassionate study of student life, calls a "f**kbuddy." Moreover, Wolfe's sex scenes are intentionally and decidedly unerotic. Like the writing about sex in a Seinfeld episode, his descriptions are more humorous than titillating; it's the sheer energy and richness of the language, rather than the acts themselves, that draw our attention.

And Wolfe's characters are hardly flat. They exhibit complexity of motive and action, not just in their surprising willingness to do things they hitherto thought impossible, but also in their experiences of guilt and self-loathing. Charlotte rather predictably feels remorse when she violates core precepts of the code she's inherited from her family, but a star basketball player surprises even himself with his sudden disgust at his own immersion in the sexual culture of his dumb-jock cronies.

Because of its focus on the college-freshman experience, this book lacks the sort of imposing adult characters prominent in Wolfe's earlier novels, The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full. There are no candidates here for "master of the universe." Perhaps that's one reason the satire, even when it takes aim at shrill campus politics, is gentler than that of the earlier books; indeed, the story ends on (mostly) light-comic notes that, while not quite restoring a sense of justice, at least provide the sense of fitting conclusions to the narrative's central dramas.

Aside from the question of how Charlotte will develop in the remainder of her college life, the central unresolved tension running through the book is philosophical. It has to do with the implications of contemporary neuroscience for our understanding of human nature, of what used to be called the soul and what is now called, in an attenuation of both metaphysics and language, the self. The dramatic significance of the soul surfaces with regularity here, as characters struggle with the question of whether they have souls and, if so, what this fact might mean. The two final chapters are titled "The Soul Without Quotation Marks" and "The Ghost in the Machine."

The philosophical implications of neuroscience are discussed explicitly in one of Charlotte's classes, taught by the Nobel prize-winning Mr. Starling, who asserts that the self is "nothing more than a 'transient composite of materials from the environment.'" Henceforth, self, mind, and soul do require quotation marks. As Starling asserts that neuroscience is turning philosophy and psychology upside down, Charlotte is "transported," feeling as if she were finally participating in the elevated life of the mind.

In this class, Charlotte does experience a kind of intellectual rapture. Exiting the lecture room, Charlotte views a campus flush with student activity. Amid "all this royal Middle English Gothic architecture," she opines to herself, there lives an "elite minifraction of the youth of America--of the youth of the world!" Most in this select group remain "blithely ignorant of the fact" that they are "merely conscious little rocks, every one of them, whereas ... I am Charlotte Simmons." The irony of her self-canceling insight is lost on Charlotte; she does not see that according to this very theory, comprehension of which makes her exult, her self-knowledge dissolves into nothing more than yet another chemical reaction determined not by the "I" of Charlotte Simmons, but purely by her environment.

Of course no novel worth reading--indeed, no life worth living--could be predicated on the assumptions of neuroscience; a moment's reflection would convince the aspiring and precocious Charlotte of this. Wolfe the novelist of ideas does not take us very far down the road toward resolution of such thorny matters. What he does accomplish, brilliantly and entertainingly, is the precise portrait of an academic culture more interested in taut tummies and binge drinking than in genuine intellectual exploration.

Mr. Hibbs is a contributor to National Review Online.