Tom Wolfe

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

As a cultural arbiter, Tom Wolfe has picked a prickly fight by depicting and assessing his vision of modern college life. Wolfe became legendary serving up the counterculture and packaging New York City’s economic elite, but his latest effort is arguably his most difficult yet—decoding the profanity-laced wit and sexually charged wisdom of today’s undergraduate youth.

I Am Charlotte Simmons, a 676-page cinder block of a work, attempts to accurately portray, in typical Wolfian anthropological style, life at an elite university. Its failure as a work of journalistic fiction does not stem solely from its carefully sketched out but nonetheless hopelessly clichéd characters, but also from its moral judgment of these characters as if they are objective examples of contemporary youth.

Wolfe’s portrait of the libidinal college youth of today wouldn’t be so important if it was not Wolfe writing—with all the gravitas and supposed cultural clarity he brings to the page. Famous for the New Journalism style he virtually pioneered in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and perfected in The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe is the best-known novelist of the intricacies of the American cultural scene.

And yet, with his self-professed role as witness and writer of American culture, combined with his (usually) capable ear for linguistic nuance, danger lies in the delicacy of Wolfe’s role as decoder of American life. That’s because in Charlotte Simmons he doesn’t merely depict undergraduate life—he damns it. And he damns it with the paltry evidence he marshals in page after innumerable page of colorful but ultimately stereotypical “evidence.”

The novel depicts life at Dupont University (think Ivy-League but with sports), an elite institution in Pennsylvania, for four very different undergraduates and a sprinkling of adults for unsubtle contrast. As with most of Wolfe’s novels there is a host of characters, but four comprise the novel’s main focus: Charlotte Simmons, the naïve and beautiful titular protagonist; Hoyt Thorpe, the self-obsessed fratboy; “Jojo” Johanssen, the gargantuan whitey baller; and Adam Gellin, Nerd.

Not surprisingly, Charlotte Simmons is the focus of the novel, and her jarring introduction to college life mirrors the surprise Wolfe hopes many readers unfamiliar with the subject will feel. The brainiac brunette from the tiny town of Sparta, in North Carolina’s Alleghany County, is so sheltered in her books and her quaint family life that she has never tasted alcohol, danced, or (we are expected to believe), learned the very first thing about sex. This is because, according to Wolfe, her mother abhorred the subject and—as we all know—parents are where all teenagers learn about illicit subjects.

Needless to say, Charlotte’s introduction to Dupont is a rude awakening. Her waif-lush roommate Beverly Amory, a Groton girl, makes a lifestyle out of drinking and chasing Lacrosse players, and frequently “sexiles” Charlotte (a term, like many bits of slang—including “hooking up,” “getting crunked,” and “grinding” Wolfe delights in establishing his knowledge of). Charlotte’s academic pursuits initially suffer setbacks as well, as when she takes a class on French Literature populated by “steaks” like Jojo who are ushered through easy courses to maintain GPAs eligible for NCAA competition.

Charlotte’s journey through her freshman year, not surprisingly, has its ups and downs. The ups include her stellar performance in a Neuroscience lecture that prompts a professor to praise her, which in turn prompts Charlotte to repeat, mantra-esque, the title of the novel in an annoying self-esteem boosting fashion. The downs involve her navigating the pitfalls of Dupont’s social scene, including a particularly harrowing libidinal run-in with Hoyt Thorpe, in which Wolfe uses words like “mons pubis” and “ball-peen hammer” to describe genitalia.

The incident leads Charlotte to question her moral character relentlessly, and engage in a bender of self-doubt in which she is described, simply as “depressed,” literally dozens of times by an uncharacteristically unimaginative Wolfe. Charlotte also mentally appeals innumerable times to “Mama,” her mother back in Sparta, a maternal figure straight out of the ’50s—the 1850s.

To make matters worse, the narrator even makes fun of Charlotte, the novel’s principled princess. When drunk for the first time, Charlotte starts to say something, forgets it, and the narrator dryly explains: “the truth was, she couldn’t remember whuh wuz funny, dude.” Assuming for the sake of argument that Charlotte is believable, open contempt of her foibles defeats the very purpose of her creation. If Wolfe is siding with the reader in critiquing Charlotte, he shouldn’t present her as the objective witness to college pandemonium at the novel’s outset. In this case, Wolfe is acting as both creator and judge, which not only breaks up the narrative drive, but also results in heavy-handed moralizing and poor portrayal.

The other characters are no more nuanced, and—surprise!—their stories collide towards the novel’s end. There are times when Wolfe veers towards originality in characterization, as when Jojo accepts Charlotte’s promptings and enrolls in difficult classes in an attempt to break the mold his creator has set for him; or when Hoyt, for a few pages, seems like he might carry a glimmer of redemption. Yet the rivers of characterization rut deep in Charlotte Simmons, and deviating from their firmly established course does not go beyond tiny rivulets of original writing.

None of this would matter, necessarily, if this were just some hack novelist who was inaccurately depicting college life with the clumsy log of his pen. But the author is Tom Wolfe, a man whose celebrated eye for cultural detail leads those who know little of his chosen subject to accept his account as truth. In a famous 1988 essay entitled “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Wolfe lambastes his literary contemporaries for not trying to accurately document the frenetic vagaries of our nation’s reality, the “irresistibly lurid carnival of American life.”

The current topic is certainly lurid, if you would believe the seventy-three-year-old authorial voice masquerading as wide-eyed Charlotte. The use of free-indirect-discourse throughout the novel often betrays Wolfe as the man behind the curtain, as when Charlotte critiques the pastiche of hotel lobbies “these days,” making her sound as if she has done and seen just about everything in this great land, until we are reminded that she doesn’t know the most basic juvenile slang.