Who is Charlotte Simmons?

By Kale Bongers | Wednesday, January 12, 2005

I Am Charlotte Simmons
Tom Wolfe
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004

It's been said that a great novel doesn't read like a novel at all, but rather like an expos�. In these rare cases, the reader soon forgets that he's reading a piece of fiction, and begins to see the work as truth, so believable is the prose. Such a work treads a delicate line: if too believable, it becomes mundane and utterly without broader meaning; if too fantastic, the reader loses the connection between himself and the characters. In I am Charlotte Simmons, social chronicler Tom Wolfe can't seem to decide if he wishes to try for the elusive 'great novel' or simply settle for a sensational work with brisk sales. The end product is neither; Charlotte Simmons is a mostly typical collegiate story populated by a mostly typical collegiate menagerie, punctuated by bursts of brilliant characterization and penetrating social observation and criticism. It is neither 'great' nor 'poor' but rather finds itself in the mire of the 'good' novel.

The story commences shortly before Charlotte Simmons, the pride of tiny, rural Sparta, North Carolina, begins her freshman year at prestigious, if fictional, Dupont University (which, despite the Wolfe's denials, is likely modeled on Duke or Stanford). Viewing Dupont as her escape from the nonexistent intellectual scene of her native mountain country, Charlotte immediately begins constructing the "life of the mind" that was denied to her at her impoverished high school, while her wealthy, guy-obsessed roommate Beverly focuses on being the life of the party. Yet while Charlotte disdains Beverly's morally-vacuous and personally-unfulfilling hedonism, she finds herself isolated, realizing that Dupont's student body is far more like Beverly than the cenacle Charlotte had envisioned. Through a series of happenstances, Charlotte comes to know the three collegiate men who will define the novel: Jojo Johanssen, the only white starter on Dupont's famed men's basketball team, who is on campus to shoot hoops and little else; Adam Gellin, a socially uncomfortable, straight-laced Rhodes Scholar-wannabe and member of the intellectual "Millennial Mutants" clique; and Hoyt Thorpe, a St. Raymond fraternity member whose life revolves around self-adulation, strong drinks, and loose women. In the whorl of their company, Charlotte slowly begins to question her beliefs and tests whether intellectual and social lives can coexist in a collegiate environment.

The remainder of the novel is a collage of twists and shifts, as Charlotte's relationships with Hoyt, Adam, and Jojo are forged, tested, and torn asunder. Wolfe lovingly chronicles Charlotte's tumultuous ride through Dupont's social strata in incredible detail, as she searches for the man (and the attached worldview) who will define her lifestyle at Dupont. Hoyt, Adam, and Jojo form a kind of boyfriend carousel; Charlotte goes for a ride on each painted pony.

She rises to popularity as the freshman girlfriend of popular senior frat boy Hoyt, subsequently falls following the loss of her virginity to Hoyt at a fraternity formal, rebounds with help from Adam, and ultimately is rehabilitated (if not fully redeemed) at the hands of a reformed Jojo. In the end, the reader is left with a somewhat muddled, yet acceptable ending: Charlotte's virtue and resurrected "innocence" are not triumphant, but they are alive; if the immorality endures, it has been dealt temporary defeat. Call it a makeshift personal redemption. It is an ending that does not fully please the reader (nor does it suit the medium of novel), but is satisfactorily lifelike to lend the conclusion a gritty, unpolished, and thoroughly true-to-reality feel that forces the reader to consent to the breach in orthodoxy.

The road to that conclusion is a different story. Wolfe tries to create taut, compelling fiction in the vein of his masterpiece The Bonfire of the Vanities, but succeeds instead in delivering a haphazard and simplistic story line that ultimately fails to impress. Wolfe's Charlotte, proves to be a genuine, sensitive heroine who (annoying propensity to burst into tears aside) establishes a strong rapport with the reader, inspiring a unique pity, as a person obviously out of her element, but also as a pastoral figure corrupted by that which she desired most deeply. Her "innocence," which at times borders on na�vet�, is somehow charming; the reader feels a need to protect her from the corrupting world and (perhaps more importantly) from herself, so skilled is Wolfe's characterization. Additionally, college-aged readers can relate to Charlotte on an emotional and experiential level, as she struggles to fit in, goes through roommate problems, and tries to discover her niche. Charlotte is the type of character people expect from Tom Wolfe.

The trouble begins when Wolfe surrounds Charlotte with the stereotypical collegiate caricatures: the ever-drunk, out-of-control frat boy, the holier-than-thou wannabe intellectual, the fashion-obsessed slut, the jock meathead, and so on. Essentially, Wolfe surrenders to the popular imagery; college is so mainstream that is doesn't hold the mystique of, say, high-level bonds trading in New York City. This is precisely the problem. Wolfe's basic groundwork is already done, and he's willing to accept that. His cutout secondary characters come to interact in mind-numbingly obvious ways, the kind often used in B-list teen movies: Adam is Jojo's tutor who in fact does the star's work for him, Hoyt and Jojo deal with the same troublesome professor, and Adam needs Hoyt's information for a blockbuster expose in the school newspaper. These connections, though passable in context, are obviously contrived. It's a disappointment coming from a social observer of Wolfe's caliber. Instead of using his secondary characters as means to achieve any overarching conclusion, he instead uses them as mere links to provide filler between his meaningful, pithy observations of undergraduate life.

These observations, when they come about, however, are brilliant and incisive. Wolfe humorously, but with a delicate touch, paints the distinct divide of urban and rural, rich and poor, in the contrast between Charlotte and her roommate Beverly Amory. In a particularly revealing scene early in the book, the Amories, scions of insurance, and the Simmonses, rural poor, join together for dinner, with predictably disastrous results. The incident initiates a common theme which is repeated throughout the book—that of a gaping moral and cultural divide between the urban societal elite and the rural common man. Despite harping on these differences, Wolfe reaches across these societal boundaries to express universal themes of testing parental and cultural limits, of the universal similarities of youth, whether high in the North Carolina mountains or holed up within the ivory towers of elite universities.

The most central of Wolfe's unifying themes is sex. Channeling his previous book, Hooking Up, Wolfe carefully explores the raw new sexuality of young adults, relationships Wolfe claims are based neither on love nor commitment but rather on social standing, peer pressure, and power dynamics. Men hold the power and bestow social standing on women who successfully navigate the narrow path between "free sample"-giving slut and hopeless prude. It's an extremely primal view, one that's exaggerated at best. Nevertheless, Wolfe pains to demonstrate this new dynamic is part of mainstream youth culture, through scenes taking place in the mountains of Sparta and at North Carolina State. Though he never explicitly says it, Wolfe seems disappointed in (if not scandalized by) the new sexuality, apparently because it lacks chivalry and mutual respect. In his portrayal of Adam, the novel's representative good guy, Wolfe takes a more negative stance on collegiate intersexual relations than most seasoned academicians are willing to take: while Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield recently caused a sensation when he claimed that the only gentlemen left on college campuses were "either gay or conservative," Wolfe suggests that even these upstanding fellows are driven mainly by caddish desires. With such a view, it's not surprising that sex is the central motivation of all the main male characters, and a means to achieve the central motivation of all of the female characters.

Wolfe depicts his background to this power drama, Dupont, as a Lord of the Flies-like scene: in the absence of any moral authority or order, the university has degraded into little more than a peer-pressure-driven moral vacuum, driven by money, power, and egos rather than any desire for truth. Academic achievement is frowned upon, as the students exult in their sports teams (the "hired mercenaries"), alcohol, hooking up, date rape drugs, and gossip. The empty hedonism and escapism of Dupont's students is spurred on and justified by pompous, deterministic professors seeking to scientifically disprove the existence of the human soul and to denigrate free will as a myth, a worldview with humans as "conscious little rock[s]" seeking to justify their predestined actions. In the name of science, truth, and reasoned exchange of ideas, Wolfe charges, the university actively cultivates a hostile environment for morality, religion, personal responsibility and self-control.

Despite this damning indictment, Wolfe is surprisingly unsure of the causes of this decay. At various points in the novel, he implicitly suggests the shift is due to a change in popular student culture, modern liberalism, modern feminism, college presidents seeking publicity, a change in the public image and import of college, and the exclusion of the hoi polloi from the most hallowed halls of learning—only to finally backtrack into an unstable, half-hearted neutrality. In short, Wolfe portrays Dupont, and in turn, elite education, as a shallow institution, a shell of its former greatness, listlessly adrift amidst the baggage discarded to reach its present form—God, chivalry, morality, individuality, truth, choice, and intellectual advancement—without clear cause and without obvious escape.

Wolfe's central thesis on the state of the big-name university and its students is magnificently, painstakingly demonstrated, but ultimately disappoints because it's a thesis to which nearly everyone already subscribes. College students sometimes prefer beer and sports to intellectual pursuits? College students hook up? Stop the presses—we're running this on page one! Wolfe is breathlessly explaining the architecture of the "new college" to an audience already fully aware of it.

Thus, it is not Wolfe's thesis but rather some of his supporting observations that are most worthwhile. Wolfe questions the prevailing view of college as a time for wanton social experimentation, the attitude which has made college a mere right of passage, a finishing school for young adults seeking a step up on the employment ladder rather than a place for intellectual fulfillment. His indictment of male/female relations is also a serious accusation that merits discussion, as is his charge that elite higher education is no longer culturally accessible to the prodigies from rural areas or religious families.

I am Charlotte Simmons is not Wolfe's best work, but it is a reasonable attempt by a 74-year-old man who graduated from college two generations ago to catch up with the times and explore the modern collegiate ethos. Wolfe's tendency for exaggeration of higher education's ailments to make a point sees mixed results. While the uninitiated will likely cry out for the destruction of Wolfe's hyperbolized modern Sodom and college students will complain of misrepresentation, Charlotte Simmons raises some serious issues facing society and the culture of higher education in a mostly readable style. Unfortunately, these topics are often obscured by simplistic characters, a muddled story line, and sometimes dubious claims of authenticity. Though his book has its redeeming moments, Wolfe could have done much better; his readers deserve (and have come to expect) more.

Who is Charlotte Simmons?

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