"What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?"

— Robert Browning, "A Toccata of Galuppi's"

In this hour of "bests," some will tell you the last restaurant they went to is the absolute best — the ribs or the Caesar salad, the yummy bread or the obscene desserts with more goop than anywhere else. For others, it's their golf clubs or their car. For still others it's the last book they read — such as, in this case, Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons."

This has been a good year for reads: Allen Guelzo's "Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President"; Ron Chernow's "Alexander Hamilton"; Michael Shaara's "Killer Angels"; "The Great Gatsby" and "Bullfinch's Mythology"; Charles McCarry's "Tears of Autumn." But "Charlotte" may exceed them all.

The chi-chi critics have panned "Charlotte" for two primary reasons: (1) envy of Wolfe, right up there with Hemingway as the most before-and-after prose stylist of the past 100 years, combined with (2) resentment that one so literarily prodigious does not share their ideological Weltanschauung. Wolfe is emphatically not one of their own but one of us. (Unforgivably, that dunce George Bush likes his stuff, even has given him a medal.) Besides, "Charlotte" is, well, you know, so exaggerated, so extreme.

Wolfe has indicated "Charlotte" likely is the last of his fictional romps. His earlier "Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man in Full" were about the excesses of masculinity and urban/corporate conceit. "Charlotte" is at once more universal (far more have experienced college than the highest reaches of nouveau wealth), more autobiographical (e.g., is it mere coincidence that "Charlotte" shares with Wolfe a devastating bout of depression?), and vastly more philosophical.

Though the Stoic philosopher Epictetus plays a central role in "A Man in Full," the philosophical questions asked in "Charlotte" (Does the soul exist? Is man a creature truly possessed of free will? What of nature vs. nurture?) suggest greatly more reach than anything Wolfe has tried before.

Superficially, "Charlotte" is about two degradations — of a brilliant naif from the Carolina mountains, and of the American campus. Why the campus? Because it is a crucially formative crucible for character and the culture.

Young Charlotte goes off to the lofty, Yale-like Dupont University with all the right motivations and equipment for a life of the mind. She winds up — what? Violated, depressed and lost in a world driven not by lofty academics but by sex, booze, semi-pro sports, the body, vindictiveness and that most malign of all influences — peer pressure.

We see the contemporary campus (was it ever any different?) through Charlotte's interactions with three campus types: the alcoholic BMOC (a "Saint Ray" — St. A? — frat boy), the jock and the newspaper dork. The place boasts practically no student interest in academics, no role for the religious, no fascination with anything but labels, alcohol, falsely premised competition, hooking up and getting it on.

Looks — from anorexic, gorgeous-gammed blondes in crotch-teasing mini-skirts to ridiculously buff guys jacked, ripped and consumed with their lats, delts, tris and abs. What's important is what's cool. It's all self-indulgence, all self-importance, all the self all the time.

Her discipline falls away and Charlotte succumbs. By the end of her freshman year in the collegiate big time, little remains of the principled back-country prodigy who had it all — and what does remain is muddled and confused.

Wolfe almost gives the game away at the beginning when, unknown to the reader, he establishes his thesis. Fascinated with neuroscience, a relatively new area of inquiry upending traditional psychology and philosophy, he cites an experiment wherein control cats observe cats with their amygdalas removed, and soon begin acting as the altered cats do. Wolfe's words: The experiment led to the discovery that a strong social or "cultural" atmosphere, even as abnormal as this one (shaped by amygdalectomized cats with their surgically induced hypermanic sexual obsession), could in time overwhelm the genetically determined responses of perfectly normal, healthy animals.

In "I Am Charlotte Simmons" Wolfe plays his thesis out — to devastating effect. Life goes from boredom to brawling, from tonsil hockey to constant rutting. Easy sex induces the death of romance. Insincerity and dripping sarcasm corrupt manners, decency and the perfectly normal.

(Confession: I read "Charlotte," or had it read to me, on tape — a shameless addiction. Voice-trained in dialect and inflection, the extraordinary reader Dylan Baker made Wolfe's convoluted narrative compelling even to one locked behind pick-ups and semis. He well may have rendered "Charlotte" an even better romp than if read the traditional way.)

So: Is Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons" the best book I've ever read? Could be — on tape. He deals devastatingly with degradation and the consequences of peer pressure. He inquires after free will and the whereabouts of the ghost in the machine. With Browning, he wonders about the soul without quotation marks. Yes indeed: "Charlotte" ranks right up there with that absolute best filet.

Ross Mackenzie is the editorial page editor at the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch.