"I Am Charlotte Simmons" Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus and Giroux Hardcover 676 pages $28.95 B
Can a man who is more than 70 years old effectively write a novel about college life? Better yet, can he realistically portray an 18-year-old woman?
In "I Am Charlotte Simmons," Tom Wolfe manages to do both, more or less. The hefty novel centers on Charlotte Simmons, a sweet, virginal prodigy from the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina.
Charlotte, unlike many of her high school classmates, is focused on academics. Because of her dedication to mastering the French language and reading Victorian literature, Charlotte finds that she can't relate to her classmates' desires to chew tobacco and drink beer. Her mentor, Miss Pennington, encourages her to apply to Dupont, the top university in the country. Charlotte, of course, wins a full scholarship.
The best university in the country must be chock full of intellectuals just burning to discuss "Madame Bovary" and neuroscience, right? This is exactly Charlotte's mentality as she and her parents pack up the family's pickup truck and drive 10 hours to Chester, Penn.
Once she gets to Dupont, however, Charlotte quickly realizes that college isn't the intellectual haven she imagined it to be, but more of a wonderland for teenage debauchery: Charlotte is sexiled by her roommate, she must share a bathroom with men, and she's hit on by a guy at a fraternity party.
What follows is Charlotte's personal struggle between staying true to herself (this means abstaining from alcohol, drugs, sex and skimpy clothes) and her obsession with being the center of attention. She quickly attracts the interest of several men on campus, including the hottest guy in the coolest fraternity, one of the starting basketball players, and the leader of the Militant Mutants, a group of disenchanted students who produce an underground newspaper.
Wolfe drags this plot out ad nauseum over "I Am Charlotte Simmons" 676 pages. While the plot is intriguing, and the novel's four main characters differ from each other enough that no character becomes boring, Wolfe could have cut out at least 100 pages.
It seems that he is so concerned with mastering the language of college students that he becomes bogged down in slang. Wolfe invents his own collegiate language called "Fuck Patois," which refers to the abundant amount of the word "fuck" that each student throws into his or her sentences. This is humorous, at times, but shows the inherent flaw in "Charlotte Simmons": although Wolfe has mastered certain aspects of college life, he lacks the language. Honestly, no student says "fuck" every other word, in every single sentence, to every single person he or she meets. Apparently, Wolfe sees college kids this way.
Another flaw in "Charlotte Simmons" has to do with its main character. Charlotte, for all of her endearing naivety, can be downright annoying. After all, how much wide-eyed innocence can a reader take? It's also hard to believe that anyone can be so self-absorbed. At one point in the novel, Charlotte becomes depressed, and it's almost difficult to keep reading through her foul mood.
Luckily, some of the other characters in the novel make up for what Charlotte lacks. Hoyt Thorpe, the hot frat guy who becomes interested in Charlotte's virginity, is funny in that he reflects the majority of co-ed "players." Hoyt likes girls, booze and the idea of becoming an investment banker, and cares about little else.
Wolfe also does a good job with Jojo Johanssen, the only white starter on Dupont's nationally ranked basketball team. "Go go Jojo," as he's referred to by fans, grapples with a hotshot freshmen defender who threatens to take his place on the starting team. Jojo, who finds himself in academic trouble throughout the novel, is attracted to Charlotte because of her obvious intelligence.
These characters make "I Am Charlotte Simmons" worthwhile. In all, the book lacks a lot of substance, but it's a step up from Wolfe's last novel, "A Man in Full." Similar to his last book, the ending of "Charlotte Simmons" doesn't measure up to the rest of the novel, but it still offers a fun perspective on college life. Just don't let your parents read it.
