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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The themes that Wolfe worked over in his first two novels, "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (1987) and "A Man in Full" (1998), are here as well, although he doesn't tackle them as directly or on such a grand scale. But race, class and the manly struggle for dominance assert themselves in the male characters' intertwining side dramas. The basketball court becomes the stage for racial tension as Jojo, one of the team's only white players, tries to assert his alpha-male status against the team's flashier and more beloved black stars. Hoyt knocks out the bodyguard of the governor of California, who is on campus for a commencement speech -- and, at the moment, receiving a blow job from a coed -- and uses the story to leverage increased status within his fraternity. And scrawny Adam rages against the moneyed and muscle-toned power of his rivals, Jojo, whom he tutors (read: writes papers for) and Hoyt, whose scandal story is the key to Adam's muckraking reportorial fame.
What makes "I Am Charlotte Simmons" less grand than Wolfe's previous novels is the setting itself. "Bonfire" swept together all of New York, and "A Man in Full" took on Atlanta's boomtown politics from the white, affluent north side to the poor black south side. In "Charlotte Simmons," Wolfe never strays from a few campus buildings, except to take us there in the first place from Charlotte's Sparta and then back home with her for Christmas break, when we see just how far from hillbilly country she has really come in a few short months. One trip to Washington, D.C., with Hoyt barely strays from the hotel room -- where, yes, Charlotte's virginal nightmare comes true.
In some ways, the narrowness of the setting -- the focus on a few elements within a subculture rather than all the cultures of a city -- works well for Wolfe; race and class issues boil underneath the main plot, popping to the surface once in a while to hint that, beyond the sexual angst, the characters are embroiled in a more terrific drama. Charlotte doesn't think much about race, but when she comes back to the dorm crying one night to find a gaggle of girls sitting in the hallway, she ignores all of their nosy questions except the black girl's, because "she had it in her mind, from social osmosis, that it was proto-racist to slough off what black students had to say." Where the characters of "Bonfire" and "A Man in Full" are stretched too thin, coming across as people who only think about race and class and status and power, Charlotte and her classmates, confined to a smaller stage, are enriched by these momentary glimpses of larger struggles.
But the problem with this particular narrow setting is that it is too familiar. Anyone who has been an undergrad in, say, the last 30 years has lived through all of this, and there's not much new to learn. It's hardly surprising that student athletes aren't quite as smart as their scholarly peers, or that frat parties are moldering caves of heavy drinking and sex, sex, sex. Any onetime freshman who foolishly believed that college would be primarily a place of academic growth will also recognize Charlotte's anxiety as her dream of "the life of the mind" slips away. It's hard to imagine whom Wolfe intended this 676-page study for, if not those who have done some time on campus, and that makes his effort all the more puzzling. One imagines Jane Goodall turning her research over to her chimps; what would they do except roll their eyes and say, "Yeah -- and?"
The only real novelty in "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is that it was written by someone as removed from the college scene as Tom Wolfe. In the details of the scenery, we're glad to have his stranger's eyes, rendering sharp observations about things we've seen perhaps too often to really notice. (In describing Hoyt's fraternity house, Wolfe writes that "the tables, magnificent old pieces that had been here ever since this huge Palladian mansion was built before the First World War, were by now riddled with dents," and the bookshelves "now held dead beer cans and empty pizza delivery boxes funky with the odor of cheese." Who can read that and not feel the loss of original purpose, how far the very idea of the university has sunk?) But Wolfe's big revelations -- that college is really all about sex, and that prudery rarely survives social pressure -- are anything but.
There's a painful scene when Charlotte arrives in Washington with Hoyt for his fraternity formal. They are with two of his frat brothers and their sorority girlfriends, who have been nothing but rude to Charlotte on the drive. Charlotte steps into the lobby of the Hyatt, the first real hotel she has ever stayed in, and is overcome by the soaring interior space. She runs outside to the car to tell the other girls about it, thrilled with her discovery: "There's this ... space, this empty space, and it goes all the way up to the roof, but it's all inside the building!" She exclaims, "Y'all oughta come see it!" One of the girls, annoyed, deadpans, "You mean an atrium?"
At the risk of sounding like a bitchy sorority girl, reading "I Am Charlotte Simmons" ultimately feels like this -- for all its charms, it's about as enlightening as staring at a hotel atrium.
