This just in: College kids love sex, booze and offensive music.

While most 12-year-olds have this figured out within an hour into viewing a typical primetime lineup on the WB, it took five years of research and writing for novelist Tom Wolfe to come to the same conclusion.

His latest foray into the underbelly of American culture, I Am Charlotte Simmons, is a lurid chronicling of collegiate living in the 21st century.

Set in the prestigious halls of the fictional Dupont University, Simmons follows the often socially and academically challenged paths of four coeds as they try to make a name for themselves on a campus rumored to be modeled after Princeton University. Weaving back and forth from four altered perspectives, the novel focuses on the title character, a sharp-minded, highly moral girl from a poor Southern family, trying to come to grips with Dupont's fast-paced lifestyle.

Apparently Wolfe lifted Charlotte's character straight out of a 19th century romance novel, because 100 pages into Simmons it's obvious her startling naivete and severe prudery can only be a product of time travel.

Charlotte is shocked, shocked (!) that men and women would live in coed dorms, or even worse, on the same floor! When going to and from the bathroom at night, Charlotte makes sure she is covered from head to toe in a full set of flannel pajamas, bathrobe and slippers.

Even then she feels indecent and exposed, that there still aren't enough layers of clothing to cover her flesh from the males she passes in the hallway.

It's at this point the reader thinks, "Wow, what happens when this girl learns about sex and underage drinking?"

Unfortunately, she does, but not without at least six chapters of painful degradation, written in an odd combination of graphic "modern slang" and stale, verbose prose that comes off like some dude in his seventies trying to establish his street cred, something that the 74-year-old Wolfe was probably trying to avoid.

Oh and yes, there is most definitely a sex scene.

Actually, it was so long, vulgar and painful that it even landed Wolfe this year's British prize for bad sex in fiction. I'm not kidding -- check it out on Google.

But aside from his awkward determination to expose the lurid world of keg-stands and random hook-ups to his readers, Wolfe almost seems to take a sadistic pleasure in showing his disdain for the whole college race, especially women and minorities.

The former are depicted as lusty, hormone-engorged waifs, completely dependent on men and commonly referred to as "skanks" by almost every male and female character in the novel.

The latter receives the stereotypical dumb jock depiction, drugged out with sky-high egos.

By the end of Simmons, it's clear that Wolfe holds no sympathy for any of the characters in his novel -- none of the central ones, and certainly not Charlotte.

So then what's the moral of the story? Don't have sex; don't do drugs?

If that's the case, I probably should have saved myself the time and just watched Reefer Madness. But if this tired tale of depravity is the best Wolfe can come up with after five years of on-the-spot research and psychological study, then maybe the creative ink has finally begun to run out of his journalistic pen.