The Entroporium

I’ve been a follower of Tom Wolfe’s essays for over 20 years. He’s fun to read and every so often, as in his essay on “the coming New Victorianism” (my phrase, not his) in Hooking Up, he blows me away. In that piece, which I originally saw in The Guardian while I was in Paris for New Year’s 2001, Wolfe posited that the 20th century had been a time of great unlearning of everything else achieved in the millenium; you know, things like “Command Economies will be disastrous versus an organically-formed economy” and “Sticking to a single sexual parner will prevent disease.” Thus, we could expect the 21st century to return us to the more conservative values of the 19th century. Right or wrong, it’s an interesting notion and one worth re-examining as we move forward.

Regardless, I approached his latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, with some trepidation. It was long, poorly reviewed and the subject was the inner life of freshman college students, something that a senior citizen in a dandy three-piece white suit was not obviously suited to handle. But a piece in The Atlantic put up a strong defense for the book and so I decided to give it a shot. It’s a tale of a too-perfect, too-unworldly girl from backwoods North Carolina who gets a full scholarship from a Stanford-like private university in Pennsylvania. The fish is out of the water. Hilarious hijinks ensue, potentially.

The first 200-odd pages were a joy. Wolfe is a master of the set piece, juggling the motivations of his characters and the cultural framework in which those motivations are formed in ways that are dizzying and exciting. Around the 400th page, any illusion had dissolved that there were any fully-formed characters as opposed to cardboard standees for Wolfe to make his finger-wagging points over & over about the “horrors” of college life. (The kids like to have sex! They like to drink! The ‘adults ‘ on campus have entirely different priorities from the students! Quelle horreur!) At that point, there is still another 300+ pages to go, including a long and discomfortingly tawdry piece on Charlotte’s deflowering at the hands of a too-bluntly evil fratboy, another 100 or so pages of Charlotte wandering around in a depressed daze and, well, a lot more. In the end, it’s just too much book for too little plot.

That would be OK if Wolfe’s usual sharply-observed commentary was evident, but he blows too many obvious details in the course of the book to give much credence to his more subtle and potentially more interesting observations. For example, the fictional university’s Finals Week takes place after Christmas and a college basketball game is seen in the fourth quarter. If he’d actually ever seen a college basketball game, surely he would know that there are not quarters, but halves. Couldn’t Wolfe (or any editor) have caught these silly mistakes? They are so jarringly Wrong that it throws the veracity of the rest of the book, already shaky given the setup, well beyond reasonable doubt.

From a marketing standpoint, it’s interesting that the cover of the paperback edition (pictured above) is designed to show Wolfe’s name, but not reveal the title of the book. Perhaps his publisher was trying to sidestep the critical bruising that the hardback took upon release, but really the cover stands as its own review. Tom Wolfe is a great essayist and this is a beautiful billboard for getting his name out there, but you can skip this book.

[Links]
“The Liberal Elite Hasn’t Got A Clue” – The Guardian, 11/1/04
Charlotte Simmons picks up Literary Review Bad Sex award – The Guardian, 12/14/04