Tom Wolfe is widely acknowledged to be one of the great journalists of his era, but his reputation as a novelist has never been as firm. He took a famous drubbing from his contemporaries John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving, “serious” novelists all, who claimed that Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998) were not literature but mere entertainment. Wolfe suggested that his eminent colleagues might just have been jealous of his novels’ popularity; none of the literature written by these giants, after all, could boast sales figures anywhere near his own. I suspect that he was right. There is more than one way to write a novel, after all—and more power to those who bend the genre a bit. Besides, Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full were so spectacularly readable that it was hard to care, much, where or whether they fit into the literary canon.
His third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, is less successful on every level.[1] It is still readable, certainly, and Wolfe retains his unequalled ear for up-to-the-minute dialogue, jargon, and slang, and his unerring nose for pretension in all its guises. Here, for instance, he catches the sound—to call it conversation would be stretching it—of a bunch of college students waiting in line to get into a concert, babbling in what Wolfe calls “fuck patois.”
He catches the tone, as always; nevertheless, there is a falling off in the work as a whole. While A Man in Full was bloated, I Am Charlotte Simmons is, at 676 pages, grossly obese: Wolfe’s purposes could as easily have been served in half that length. Instead of keeping it brief and pithy, like his best work (Radical Chic, The Painted Word, and other classics), he has gone in for lazy repetition. If something is funny or makes a good point, he seems to think, why not say it twice—or three times, or four? Finally, he commits the inexcusable sin of stating, and then repeating, the obvious.
With this new novel, as everyone must know after the media blitz that accompanied its publication, Wolfe has taken on the subject of twenty-first-century college life. He invested a huge amount of effort and research into the project, visiting many campuses across the country, including Stanford, Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, and the University of Michigan. The result is the fictional Dupont University, a cross between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, and various other high-ranking institutions. The very name “Dupont” reeks of status, and the Dupont man (or woman) can hardly help wallowing in understandable hubris:
Dupont! Science—Nobel winners! whole stacks of them! [reflects a creepy frat boy named Hoyt Thorpe] … although he couldn’t exactly remember any names … Athletes—giants! national basketball champions! top five in football and lacrosse! … although he found it a bit dorky to go to games and cheer a lot … Scholars—legendary! … even though they were sort of spectral geeks who floated around the edges of collegiate life … Traditions—the greatest!—mischievous oddities passed from generation to generation of … the best people! A small cloud formed—the rising number of academic geeks, book humpers, homosexuals, flute prodigies, and other diversoids who were now being admitted … Nevertheless! There’s their Dupont, which is just a diploma with “Dupont” written on it … and there’s the real Dupont—which is ours!
Into this firmament steps Wolfe’s heroine, Charlotte Simmons, an innocent in the tradition of Voltaire’s Candide—or, more properly, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy, for she is almost as clueless, and her adventures almost as lubricious, as that cutie’s. Charlotte is a little hick from a North Carolina hollow. An academic prodigy, she has been sheltered from the cruder aspects of modern life by her rigorous studies and her conservative, religious family. When she arrives for her freshman year at Dupont this dewy virgin is ripe for deflowering. Who will have the privilege? And will Charlotte’s ideals, and her future as a scholar, survive?
There are three competitors for Charlotte’s bed, and through these boys Wolfe brings together separate and competing strands of university life. First there is Adam Gellin, best classified as the aforementioned academic geek. Adam aspires to a Rhodes Scholarship and a glorious future as a public intellectual, but he is low on both the social and financial totem poles at Dupont, and his life there amounts to a series of petty humiliations. Next is Jojo Johansen, famous as the only white starter on the great Dupont basketball team. Despite his Olympian status on campus, Jojo is disarmingly humble. He has cruised through college on the strength of his athletic prowess; his fitful if genuine interest in academics has been thoroughly discouraged by the formidable Coach Roth and mocked by the rabid anti-intellectualism of the other athletes.
Finally there is the consummately repulsive Hoyt Thorpe. He is the handsomest boy in the “best” frat on campus, and hence inhabits the very empyrean of Dupont’s social system, though he contributes nothing to campus life beyond drinking beer, watching ESPN, and waiting for the day when he will assume his birthright by joining a high-profile investment bank. A cross between Cary Grant and Hugh Grant, with a nasty sneer pasted across his face—one imagines him looking rather like Robert Chambers, the preppie murderer—Hoyt is a scumbag. Needless to say, he is irresistible to Charlotte, who despite her initial academic success soon falls behind in her studies as she gets caught up in the campus’s overheated sexual atmosphere and the female students’ all-encompassing activity, “The hunt! The hunt! The boyfriend! Necessary as breathing! What academic achievement, what soaring flight of genius, even a Nobel Prize in neuroscience, could ever be as important!”
The material is delicious, and Wolfe’s observations are as sharp as ever, but he has ruined I Am Charlotte Simmons by trying to write two different books and succeeding in neither. The first book is a straightforward social satire about campus life. This is a genre that comes naturally to him, but it falls flat in Charlotte Simmons because he is unable to communicate his own point of view to his readers. Students are sex-obsessed and promiscuous—true. Their bacchanalias are disgusting—true. Small-town innocents like Charlotte get debauched—true. But is Wolfe really as surprised as he claims, and as disgusted? Sure, campus life is different from what it was when he attended college fifty years ago, but I find it—at least as he describes it—substantially unchanged from my own time as a freshman thirty years ago. Boys don’t ask girls out on “dates,” but then they didn’t in the 1970s, either. Students only use their first names when they introduce themselves to one another: Charlotte’s was, says Wolfe, “the first generation to go through life with no last name.” No, I would actually say it’s about the third; I can remember my own parents making exactly the same comment to me in about 1974. The truth is that the real changes in student life and behavior must have occurred back in the Sixties, and it’s a little surprising that Tom Wolfe of all people, who has built a huge career by keeping his finger on the nation’s social pulse, hasn’t understood this. Just where has he been for the last forty years? Certainly not hanging out on college campuses, or even seeing popular campus movies like Revenge of the Nerds or Animal House (made in the Seventies, set in the early Sixties).
It is true that the culture has been further vulgarized in recent years. When I was in college and even high school the word “fuck” was certainly not uncommon, but neither did anyone—even fraternity scum—speak in “fuck patois.” And while dorms were coed in my day, we female students did not have to submit to the ultimate barbarity of the coed bathroom, of which Wolfe gives brilliantly graphic descriptions. Women’s liberation has achieved many wonderful things, but I can’t think of any woman who feels that having to share a bathroom with a man, even with a beloved husband, can really be seen as a step forward.
The second book that Wolfe has tried to write, alongside his campus satire, is a novel that explores his pet interest: the recent work done in neuroscience which seems to suggest that the structure of the human brain is comparable to an analog chemical computer and that what we have been pleased to call our “souls” or our “selves” simply do not exist. I Am Charlotte Simmons is, in this context, immediately seen to be an ironic phrase; Charlotte, who had been thoroughly drilled in her own brilliance and exceptionality by besotted teachers and parents, repeats this mantra with increasing hopelessness as it becomes ever clearer that she is in no way unique. She does not have, Wolfe seems to be saying, a soul: she is simply a young female programmed to do what young females do. As Wolfe himself wrote several years ago in his popular essay “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,” studies have shown that “teenage girls, being in the prime of their fecundity, are genetically hardwired to be promiscuous and are as helpless to stop themselves as rabbits.”
Wolfe has read fairly deeply into the literature of neuroscience, and once we are aware of his agenda, his novel’s theme and construction become a little obvious. The Dupont students are crude creatures, intent only on obtaining the following: sex, food, stimulation (artificial or otherwise), and prestige. Prestige is important not only in its own right but as a means of attracting more sexual partners. Academic prowess brings, for primal reasons hardwired into the brain, less prestige than good looks, athletic skill, or that indefinable je ne sais quoi currently known as “cool.” Boys and men go through countless ritual challenges and tests of masculinity designed to establish their place on the prestige-scale. Girls are genetically programmed to try to obtain the man with the highest possible prestige, and Charlotte, like so many others, ultimately finds that her own prestige derives not from her achievements but from her partner, who is essentially nothing but a trophy (as she is herself by virtue of her looks and fecundity).
All this might be true and probably is, but it doesn’t make for very good fiction. One might even say that the death of free will is the death of fiction, reducing characters to computers and action to reaction. The supposedly brilliant Charlotte is just about the dumbest heroine we’ve seen in years, with as little self-control or self-understanding as the most vacuous of the sorority chicks she scorns. When she ends up as merely the pretty girlfriend of a high-status male, we’re not only not surprised, we’re not even sorry, having become thoroughly sick of the smug, narcissistic little dope.
But if Charlotte Simmons is a disappointment, it is only one in terms of Wolfe’s generally high standards. The book is laugh-out-loud funny on almost every page, and occasionally makes points about college life, and by extension American culture generally, that really need to be made. Here, for example, Dupont’s president muses on the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, treated reverently by parents, students, and college administrators alike.
U.S. News & World Report—what a stupid joke! Here is this third-rate news weekly, aimed at businessmen who don’t like to read, trying desperately to move up in the race but forever swallowing the dust of Time and Newsweek, and some character dreams up a circulation gimmick: Let’s rank the colleges. Let’s stir up a fuss. Pretty soon all of American higher education is jumping through hoops to meet the standards of the marketing department of a miserable, lowbrow magazine out of Washington, D.C.! Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Dupont—all jumped through the hoop at the crack of the U.S. News whip! Does U.S. News rate you according to how many of the applicants you offer places to actually enroll in your college and not another? Then let’s lock in as many as we can through early admissions contracts. Does U.S. News want to know your college’s SAT average? We’ll give it to them, but we will be “realistic” and not count “special cases” … such as athletes.
This is the kind of straight-shooting we have come to expect from Wolfe, and there is just enough of it to make I Am Charlotte Simmons worth looking at—if not worth looking at too seriously.
Brooke Allen’s latest book is Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior (Ivan R. Dee).
Notes
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- I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 688 pages, $28.95. Go back to the text.
