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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
America's patrician journo-novelist goes back to college and finds -- surprise! -- the halls of academe strewn with beer cans, pizza boxes and used condoms.
Nov 10, 2004 | News of Tom Wolfe's latest novel started circulating long before the release date was announced; mostly, the reports contained lines like this one from the Tallahassee Democrat: "During the research phase for the novel in the late '90s, Wolfe ... ended up at 'a lot of frat parties' at the University of Florida." The image that conjures up -- of the 70ish writer in a high-collared shirt and white suit hanging against the wall at a late-night college booze fest, scribbling in his reporter's notebook while 18-year-olds did keg stands -- is not easy to get rid of once it lodges itself in your brain. (To be fair, Wolfe apparently changed into a navy blazer for his undercover missions.) And it certainly raised some doubts about the book in question. How would he ever convince his subjects to "act natural" in front of him? And what idea of collegians would he come away with?
To Wolfe's immense journalistic credit, the college experience he renders in "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is actually pretty accurate. The book is an amalgamation, of sorts, of "Animal House," "Revenge of the Nerds," "PCU" and "Old School," minus the comic pratfalls and with a heavy dose of angst. We get the "whining diversoids" turning every remark into an instance of sexism or racism, the thick-necked musclemen who live at the gym, the puking tailgaters and, most of all, the banal conversation stylings of party kids ("how-drunk-I-was stories, guy's-such-a-loser stories, can-you-believe-what-a-slut-she-is stories"). The action plays out through the scrim of Wolfe's pet theory that social pressure trumps free will, and that in college, having sex is the greatest social pressure of all.
The eponymous heroine of this tale is a freshman from Sparta, N.C., a Podunk town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Charlotte Simmons, daughter of a devout evangelical mother and a stoic mountain-man father, star pupil and the pride and joy of her entire county, wins a scholarship to Dupont University. She is strong and proud ("I am Charlotte Simmons" is her mantra, reminding her that she is destined for great things) and filled with dreams of living "the life of the mind" at Dupont. She's also a teetotaling virgin who has never so much as seen an issue of Cosmo. It doesn't take long for us to realize that Charlotte is doomed to fall off her pedestal of purity.
The fictional Dupont itself is more Harvard or Duke than University of Florida. Situated in a grove in the middle of a slum town in Pennsylvania, it's an Eden of gardens, gazebos and majestic old buildings and statuary. It's a picturesque setting of academe, but also one of privilege, and the other girls that Charlotte first encounters, including her roommate, are rich and snotty, and they look down on her Southern accent and innocent mountain ways. Poor Charlotte is mortified by the coed bathrooms in her dorm, the stench of beer, and the foul language -- what Wolfe calls "Fuck Patois" -- of college-kid chatter. She immediately recognizes that by sticking to her moral code, she is destining herself to four years of isolation.
But Charlotte's moral code starts to adapt itself to the pressure to fit in. Within the arboreal walls of the school lurk three suitors who quickly turn Charlotte's life into the busy one of melodrama. There is Adam, the nerdy virgin who writes for the campus paper; Jojo, the tall but dimwitted basketball star; and Hoyt, the cool fraternity boy whose hobbies are -- what else? -- drinking and having sex with girls, who he and his buddies charmingly call "cum dumpsters." Jojo is the first of the guys to fall for Charlotte, and we first glimpse her through his eyes: "She wasn't beautiful in any way you usually thought about this place. He couldn't give it a name, but whatever she had was above all that." Jojo and the other two guys are attracted by Charlotte's purity, though their most immediate goal is to divest her of it. Charlotte knows her best choice is Adam, but when she gets envious looks from other girls who see her with the smarmy but handsome Hoyt, she promptly falls for the most dangerous of the three.
The boys' inner lives are injected with enough nuance and contradiction to make them feel true, although like most Wolfe-ian characters, they primarily serve as types: the Nerd, the Frat Boy, the Jock. Charlotte is a surprising exception; the first female lead character that Wolfe has ever written, she is textured and genuine. She's smart and tough but remains mostly unaware of her biggest flaws, like the fact that, despite her own loser status, she recoils at the sight of heavier or uglier girls, or the vanity that makes her hem her skirt ever higher to show off her legs, even as she's protesting against the sexual advances of her admirers.
Despite her goody-two-shoes veneer and relative innocence, Charlotte thinks and responds to people, especially men, just like any 18-year-old girl trying to get a grip on a new reality. The scenes in which she plays out her internal confusion about sex are the book's smartest and most realistic -- and therefore funniest -- moments. The first night that Adam kisses her, she clumsily tries to avoid intimacy with this guy she's not attracted to, but who she wants to keep as a friend: "Charlotte was too embarrassed -- embarrassed? -- but that was the way she felt! -- to look at his face again. So she pulled her head downward from his lips and rested it on his chest, to spare his feelings. Big mistake. This merely spurred him on to more passionate moaning."
