I Am Charlotte Simmons
By Tom Wolfe,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 676 pages, $28.95
Nobody writes novels the way Tom Wolfe writes novels. Nobody aims higher or digs deeper, nobody flings out his arms wider and tries to gather in so many things all at once.
You can love or hate Wolfe’s work, but you can’t be indifferent. You will be filled with gloom or glee at the prospect of his latest, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” which follows soft on the heels of “A Man in Full” (1998) and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987), which themselves followed Wolfe’s distinguished output of genre-expanding journalism. But you can’t be wishy-washy, because Wolfe’s work won’t allow it. His style of writing–relentless, insistent, a big, sticky, bearhug of paragraphs–demands a passionate reaction right back.
And even if you hate it, you also must concede that Wolfe employs a unique technique for chronicling the world. When you read him, you become aware of how predictable and mass-produced other novels seem by comparison, how like Hummel figurines.
Wolfe is an anomaly, and the savage reactions to his work prove this dramatically. Reviewers accuse Wolfe of that most heinous and unforgivable of modern cultural crimes: naivete. Anything else–misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, even the slippage of talent–may be winced at but ultimately overlooked. Yet the charge of not getting it, of being insufficiently ironic, is a capital offense in this age of the Lettermanesque squint, of the Jon Stewart double take, of the all-too-plausible headlines from The Onion.
Wolfe, though, just continues to do what he does, which is to tell us about worlds we already think we know quite well, but that actually, Wolfe would gently counter, we don’t. We’re not always as smart or as hip as we think we are. In fact, we’re quite possibly never as smart or as hip as we think we are, which is why we need Wolfe and his wide-angle lens on the world.
In “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” he records the adventures of a sweet, bright and socially and erotically inexperienced young woman who enrolls at a fancy college and gradually is transformed by her ordeals. The novel is overgrown (676 pages) and galumphing and flawed but basically good-hearted, which is to say that it resembles the very adolescents the author tries to paint in this novel. In their outsize appetites for ideas as well as sex, in their awkward, gangling but ultimately endearing gropes toward maturity and self-fulfillment, Wolfe’s undergraduates are captivating and convincing.
Lord knows they’re not perfect–“I Am Charlotte Simmons” will make you groan with embarrassment for their dumb mistakes, their drearily repetitious and unimaginative profanity–and Lord knows the novel, too, has its clunky moments, its long, mediocre stretches. But both the novel and the spotlighted students at Dupont University–Wolfe’s stand-in for Duke, or is it Stanford?–possess a sinewy vibrancy, the kooky oomph of reality, that smoother, more nuanced novels lack.
Unquestionably, a certain cartoonishness does pervade some portions of “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” But life itself can be cartoonish–as well as buffoonish and noisy and contradictory, and there is a great deal of life in this novel.
Some scenes, moreover, are as good as any fiction Wolfe has ever produced. When Charlotte’s working-class parents first drive her to the Gothic playground of the Dupont campus, their apprehension is matched only by their prickly defensiveness. A student volunteer approaches to ask if he can help carry Charlotte’s things up the stairs; her father waves him away. Writes Wolfe: “Daddy turned to Momma and said, ‘He’d want a tip.’ “
To appreciate the perfect pitch of that moment, perhaps you have to have been in a similar situation, into which class differences inject an almost unbearable poignancy. Nobody writes about class the way Wolfe writes about class; nobody quite gets at the crucial things at stake in any clash of classes, things such as dignity and self-respect, the way Wolfe does. It’s not always about dollars and objects. Sometimes, it’s about souls.
Later, when Charlotte’s roommate, Beverly Amory–the daughter of a corporate titan and his gossamer-wing of a wife–shows up in the dorm room, the rich folks give Charlotte and her straight-out-of-“Green Acres” parents the once-over. “The smiles,” Wolfe writes, “seemed not so much cheery as patient.” Bull’s-eye.
The girls and their parents then head off to a restaurant of the Simmonses’ choosing: the Sizzlin’ Skillet. How much is symbolized by the missing “g” at the end of “Sizzlin’–how that jaunty absence echoes throughout the meal, and how expertly Wolfe depicts the Amorys’ contempt for anything sizzlin’ or cracklin’:
“Each plate was covered, heaped, with skillet-fried food. . . . Mrs. Amory inspected her fried chicken as if it were a sleeping animal. No more smiles, no conversation.”
Once the parents are out of the way, college life can really get going: classes, drinking bouts, relationships, the tight daily weave of personalities and really, really important stuff. Nothing in one’s subsequent life ever quite matches the intensity of the undergraduate experience, and Wolfe renders Charlotte’s buoyant awakenings–and despairing realizations–with his usual pinwheeling brio: “In that moment . . . Charlotte experienced a kairos, an ecstatic revelation of something too vast, too all-enveloping, too profound to be contained by mere words. ” Believe it or not, the occasion for this geyser of emotion is not sex, but a classroom lecture. Wolfe offers his characters the ultimate compliment of endowing them with minds as well as libidos.
That includes members of the Dupont basketball team, who play a crucial role in “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” Jojo Johanssen, a starter on the school’s renowned hoops squad, is portrayed as a lout with a brain–a brain that, once aroused, is actually capable of original thought. There is a priceless scene in which Johanssen tries to explain his newfound intellectual passion to his more narrowly focused coach.
Wolfe sprinkles the novel with topical details, with the slang and brand names and TV shows that probably define a generation more definitively than any other anthropological marker. Critics are already arguing about his choices–Did he get such-and-such term right, or is it already as heinously dated as, say, “groovy”?–and Wolfe, it could be, knows very well that he’s bound to start such arguments and secretly enjoys the sport.
In “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” Wolfe does what he always does: He bites off more than he can chew. Yet he never tempers his appetite, never lets his ambition be reduced to careful nibbles. The author’s extravagant books make him a pariah in these days of delicate, pruned-back sentences and low-carb prose, but he doesn’t seem to care.
Wolfe is not for every taste–some will find “I Am Charlotte Simmons” bombastic and inflated, like one of those garish balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade that are supposed to be cute but end up seeming bloated and scary–yet when we get around to deciding which novels belong in the time capsule defining our age to future civilizations, we could do a lot worse than “I Am Charlotte Simmons.”
Too many current novels aim too low; they want to capture only the fleeting moment, the transient nuance. Wolfe, God bless him, wants to get the whole shebang between the covers of a book, the whole mad carnival. You can imagine Wolfe perched earnestly on the strained cover, like a traveler atop a too-full suitcase, trying to secure the latch.
It’s a comical thought, until you realize that so many other authors could fit the sum total of their goals and insights into a demure little purse. And then the amusement turns to gratitude. At least somebody, you think, is still trying to get it all in, still pushing, still pressing. Still certain that bigger is better, that life is knowable through its staggering breadth as well as its subtle nuances.
