Book Review by Michael A. Winkelman
April 17, 2005
I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe (FSG, 2004)
So what’s happening on campus these days? Many people have turned to Tom Wolfe’s bestselling I Am Charlotte Simmons to find out. The picture Wolfe paints isn’t pretty, but the poor quality of the novel itself dampens his disparagement significantly. Slogging through Wolfe’s magnum opus on contemporary college life turns out to be a trying experience for all but the least discriminating reader. This reviewer finds the subject matter, academia, almost endlessly fascinating, but this attempt at capturing the collegiate zeitgeist contributes little to the field.
The narrative follows Charlotte Simmons, a bright frosh from Appalachia who, thanks to a merit scholarship, matriculates at the fictional Dupont University in Pennsylvania. Dupont is a school with a grand tradition of Ivy-League-level scholastic excellence plus a nationally prominent sports program. Charlotte’s first year is an eye-opener: the arc of the story follows the female temptation plot. Subplots dealing with el machismo, a major theme, concern fraternity life and the highly ranked men’s basketball team. Charlotte meets a boy from each circle first semester, as well as an intelligent nerd who writes for the school paper and belongs to an informal group of wannabe world-changers who call themselves Millennial Mutants.
The faults of this book are legion. The writing is wretched, and the whole work is bloated and heavy-handed. The characters are cardboard stereotypes, and the overall view of human nature is horrendously simplistic. Wolfe’s lack of nuance frequently makes one cringe; most of the big scenes ring false. Wolfe researched this book, and he is undoubtedly correct in portraying the hedonistic side of college life for the elite children of privilege today: binge drinking, the perks for so-called student-athletes, the materialism and Epicureanism for upper-class kids who might as well be at camp. But his treatment nonetheless is grating. There’s something out of touch about it (Wolfe is now eighty years old). Sure, students use what he calls “Fuck Patois,” but dialogue like this gets stale fast:
Hoyt said, “Relax, What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
“We get fucked, is what happens. This fucking tool has us assaulting two bodyguards, like we started it. Two bodyguards—I mean the fuck, the fucking guy’s talking about two bodyguards, and who the fuck needs to get caught in the middle of some goddamned story about the governor of California getting himself sucked off by Syrie Fucking Stieffbein?” (p. 243)
Beyond turning this into a grammatical exercise, parsing that exchange to determine what parts of speech the F-word is used for, there’s little to be gained from Wolfe’s attempts at linguistic verisimilitude. His descriptions of ‘dirty dancing’ (described interminably with repeated “rut rut rut rut” sentences) turn equally dull; to beat readers over the head with these showings of stupidity or nihilism doesn’t make for much of a book. The sex scenes are particularly poorly done. On the dance floor, Charlotte “could feel the bone of her mons pubis pressed against his and she realized they were grinding” (p. 469). (The London Review gave the novel its Bad Sex award.) If Wolfe was trying to make intentionally bad to make a point, he seems to have failed. Surely some young people must take some pleasure in coition? (In contrast, the infamous marionette sex-scene in the film “Team America” is very funny because it involves puppets; it also only lasts a few minutes.) Some of the few decent scenes involve the student-athletes, and the conflicts caused by the imbalance of their lives across that hyphen. The all-powerful celebrity coach, the groupies, and a scene between the coach, the politic university president, and a hot-headed medieval history professor on the trail of a plagiarism case wasn’t bad.
But is this satire, finally? If so, it’s not very successful. After two promising opening scenes, one involving a science experiment about feline mating and another setting up a potentially scandalous contretemps involving an alumni politician, things bog dog and stay bogged down. Throughout, Wolfe seems to lack control of his narrative. Additionally, Dupont never comes across as a fully realized place we know and should care about. The classroom scenes are unrealistically depicted, and such a school would definitely have an intervarsity Christian fellowship for kids like Charlotte, something that might have alleviated her culture shock. Also, the formulaic encounters ring false—new students meet tons of people, as they try to find themselves and decide where they fit in best, but Charlotte only has frat life, the ungainly hoops star who hits on her, two ‘loser’ frosh girlfriends, and one good class (but I doubt a Nobel scientist would actually be caught dead lecturing to lowly undergrads).
The potential for some kind of alliance between Charlotte and her roommate Beverly, who is an anorexic, alcoholic, slutty, cell-phone-addicted snob was also by-passed. There were grounds for humor and character development there—these two might have had something to teach one another. An escalating guerrilla warfare between them was another unrealized comic option. In fact, the plot is continuously mishandled, including the subplots, the pairings up, and the ending, which some feminists will find misogynistic. (It’s also anti-macho, though, and indeed the work as a whole seems rather misanthropic.
One wonders what readers find to like here. Do they skip around for the scenes of debauchery? Do they feel a kind of titillating reverse elitism when hearing about the shallowness of Dupont life? Are their suspicions are confirmed while the salacious details can be enjoyed vicariously? Is it actually being read through?
Those interested in academic satire need not despair: there are superior works available. For the fun-loving side, there’s the classic movie “Animal House.” For novels, there are, first, Moo by Jane Smiley, a grand work in every sense, which puts I Am Charlotte Simmons to shame. For those most interested in the faculty interest, check out The Lecturer’s Tale by James Hynes or Small World by David Lodge. Three enjoyable books about grrrl power, which are structurally similar to this one, but more upbeat and realistic are Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and of more recent vintage, Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen (the best multicultural novel I know), and Juno and Juliet by Julian Gough, a bittersweet Irish tale centered around the University of Galway—all three offer the pleasures of literature in the best sense.
Grade for I Am Charlotte Simmons: C-.
‘CWolfe review’ dox [offc], 4/05