Book Review: I Am Charlotte Simmons

I Am Charlotte Simmons
Tom Wolfe
688 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. $29
692 pages. Jonathan Cape, 2004. £20.

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Few literary novels come preceded by so many negative reviews. It is almost as if the literary establishment was out to get Tom Wolfe for his many arrogant pronouncements and attitudes over the years. When I Am Charlotte Simmons was released, there was a flurry of lackadaisical and even hostile reviews in all the usual media – many that mentioned the reviewers’ anger at not receiving copies of the book in advance. (Some suggesting that the publisher did not send advance copies to reviewers because the book was so bad that they wanted it in stores before the bad reviews came out.) Of course, how much of this negative tone is due to the book and how much to the reviewers’ egos being bruised by not getting their copies before the rest of us?

Well, I’m not as harsh as all those professional reviewers. While it’s not the best of Wolfe’s three novels, it is certainly much better than a lot of fiction on the best-seller lists today.Let me first parenthesize – I think Tom Wolfe’s two novels to date (The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full) are two of the finest American novels in recent decades. Perhaps A Man in Full inspires more than The Bonfire of the Vanities because of its attempt to weld a philosophical view of life to a mundane existence, but chapter 22 of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of the most powerful examples of writing I know. In this chapter, the “master of the universe” Sherman McCoy goes to jail – Wolfe’s depiction of the feelings, sights, sounds and smells of the jail cell, together with McCoy’s fear and loathing of the place in which he finds himself, is a textbook example of how to write.

I Am Charlotte Simmons can be reduced to a simple plot-line: unsophisticated girl from the mountains of North Carolina goes to Ivy League college (on a full academic scholarship) and finds that it is Sodom and Gommorah. But it is unfair to reduce this novel to such a simplistic outline. Wolfe is a master of characterization, and, while the Charlotte Simmons character is perhaps a bit naive, and some of the other characters seem overly stereotypical, Wolfe depicts them with depth and insight. His writing is full of verve and freshness, and the story rolls on with drive and élan. While Wolfe gets perhaps overly absorbed in the linguistic aspects of college life (the commonality of four-letter words gets several discourses), and while he gets a few of the details wrong, that doesn’t matter. Wolfe is here writing like an ethnologist discovering a tribe that he never knew, and that, perhaps, he longs to be a part of.

In some ways, Charlotte Simmons’ attitudes can be seen as those of a much earlier time. It is almost as if here life in North Carolina kept her from entering the modern era; her thoughts seem, at first, Victorian. This gives a strange feeling: how could she be so out of touch with the rest of American reality? In spite of coming from a small town “with three traffic lights”, and having a morally rigid (though not fundamentalist) mother, she seems a bit askew in the area of social mores. But she wants to fit in, desperately. She is lonely, at first, and wants to be accepted, even appreciated. This drives her to what, for her, are desperate measures: spending an inordinate amount of money on “cool” jeans; going to a bar with a fake ID; drinking alcohol for the first time; and, eventually, losing her virginity.

In the true Victorian manner, Charlotte is used; taken advantage of by a frat boy as she “loses her pop-top” at a frat formal, embarrassing herself even more by the drops of blood she leaves on the sheets. Yet she knew, deep down, what she was getting into, going to the formal with one of the coolest guys in the hippest fraternity at the college. Is she naive? Weak? Or just in need of an affirmation of herself?

What is chilling about this book is its portrayal of the elite of the United States – the country’s future leaders – excelling in loutishness, wanton abandon and just plain stupidity. It has long been known that fraternity culture is low on the intellectual scale, and this even in the finest of colleges. Wolfe is not exaggerating much as he depicts the rampant alcohol and sex that is the main preoccupation of these college students; but I think he missed out on the drugs, which are barely mentioned.

In the end, Wolfe shows us how the four central characters in the book attain some sort of finality: one gets his comeuppance; another his 15 minutes of fame; another redeems himself in his own eyes and in the eyes of others; and Charlotte finds her happiness. What detracts a bit from this Victorian ending is the way that Charlotte, the underdog with her ideals and morals, finally settles for status and standing at the university rather than something more noble.

While this is not Wolfe’s best novel, it is enjoyable, and, in spite of the exaggerated presence of sex, alcohol and loutishness, the story is one good ride.

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