I Am Charlotte Simmons
By Tom Wolfe
HarperCollins, 676 pages, $37.95
Sludging through Tom Wolfe's latest novel, which is his first in four years and is precisely as thick as four Belgian waffles, I was alternately stricken by size-anxiety and obscure nostalgia.
Wolfe is, of course, the polymathic, now-well-seasoned avatar of New Journalism, whose fieldwork among acid-heads and Tangerine Flake Streamline Babies paved the way for Hunter S. Thompson's experience as a Hells Angels kicking-bag and for Norman Mailer's tenure as Death Row's best friend.
What is unusually provocative about I Am Charlotte Simmons is its apparent gravitas. Surely, one thinks, say, 300 pages and 50 blurry annotations in, Wolfe is satirizing something. After failing to comprehend the alleged master social commentator's particular post-gonzo wedge, one then begins to ruminate, perhaps pointlessly, on the subtext.
The novel's Sparta, N.C., heroine is a fish-out-of-water transplant to Dupont College, a transparency of Harvard, delineated in what SNL-impresario Lorne Michaels once referred to, disdainfully, as the "Walter Crankcase" school of satire. A liberal arts student, she also excels at neuroscience, and is immediately noticed by her Nobel Prize-winning professor for her flawed-yet-provocative attempt to debunk Darwin's "superstitious" ontological postulates.
Darwin, the laureate argues, "was swept up in [a]general belief in progress" at a time when "progress was on everybody's mind." Wolfe, who spent a great deal of time on college campuses researching the novel, is likely arguing, through this somewhat elevated and anterior voice, that though progress in the academy may appear to be axiomatic, it is nothing more than a commonly held belief.
Wolfe's Dupont students, like the architectural and painterly conceits and the Wall Street as Vanity Fair he has skewered in the past, are technologically advanced -- the youths he describes are more hard-wired, from their iPods to their laptops, than Kubrick's Hal -- yet they are, correlatively, it would seem, shockingly intellectually and morally lame.
At one point, Charlotte Simmons attempts to read a book in which the author wonders why brains accelerate according to the information they hold, as opposed to computers, which decelerate accordingly. If there is a thesis in this book, this is it: A surfeit of tech-access approaches simulation of the technology at hand.
That said, this small conjecture is barely available in a book devoted, more flagrantly, to capturing the contemporary student: his or her language, practices and world views. Wolfe attempts, valiantly, to duplicate a culture that is, unfortunately, not nearly as esoteric as aerospace, as Jackson Pollock's life (and art, in the obverse), or even LSD, or what LSD once meant to tourist readers whose idea of a trip was ordering a double sidecar, no rocks, with a phenobarb chaser.
Charlotte Simmons is well researched: One can almost hear Wolfe's Mont Blanc lashing at times, particularly when he is trying to record, through his three central male characters (a jock, a nerd and a cad), the cadences of hip hop, the various strata of profane slang and the mechanics of the "hook-up." The problem is that Wolfe, whose writing has always been grossly adjectival and chic-specific, has failed to capture any news of interest about American youth, and comes off instead like one of those horrible professors who tried to make you listen to Imagine while simultaneously getting off on his status as a pedagogical errant.
As with Harvard disguised as Dupont, Dr. Dre is transformed, charmlessly, into Dr. Dis, and the lyrics that Wolfe provides are offensive only because they show no recognition of hip hop whatsoever: Dre's genius is reduced here to the kind of lyrics MC Hammer may have written in a drunken stupor: "Know'm saying?/ Fucking gray boy say, 'yo, you a beast.'/ I take my piece, yo, stick it up yo' face . . ." In truth, this is too appalling to attribute to Hammer, or Vanilla Ice, for that matter: It is the kind of cursory assessment a knuckle-dragger might bring to the notion of fat women, Viking horns and opera, and ill behooves the man who once attempted to change journalism by inhabiting the lives of his subjects.
There are other small heresies here: Wolfe does not appear to know how young men and women dress; he is as fascinated as Margaret Mead by the way in which his subjects are able to provide declensions for curse words and as giddy as an Amish pimp at the idea of promiscuity. This is a surprising "revirginating" (to quote one of his puppet-coeds) for a man who once had his finger on the pulse of the now.
Wolfe was clearly so fascinated by the folkways of profane, libidinous students that he neglected to open his eyes and observe what we all see: the pageant of youth culture that is apparent to anyone with the exception of Luddites and old men who have never listened to Britney Spears, let alone realized that a hot guy would never, now, under any circumstance, evoke her name as a pickup line.
I Am Charlotte Simmons is a novel best read as a simulation of master Sidney Sheldon's work: Revamped as trash-lit, it tells the riveting tale of an outsider among archetypes, one whose destiny (which is, bluntly stated, to reiterate the book's title in an act of feminist puissance) becomes entangled among the warring factions of the athletes, intellects and privileged that constitute Dupont-Harvard.
The depressing ending testifies to other of Wolfe's goals: Through Charlotte, he clearly hoped to find one of Gissing's or Dickens's hard waifs; instead, he half-draws a caricature. Simmons is as dead as the one-dimensional boys she plays with, boys who might have shocked the pre- Less Than Zero crowd, but do not shock now. She is as pathetically undefined as the cover illustration, which features a cheerleader (though none appears in the book) whose pounding chest appears to be lit by grotesque medical imaging, a conflation that tells us precisely nothing about her or the narrative's (failed) intention.
As social satire, I Am Charlotte Simmons surely fails. Satire, as Pope once wrote, is a "sacred Weapon . . . left for truth's Defence/ sole dread of folly, Vice and insolence!" Because there is so little truth available here, the satire lists like a drunken frat boy's amorous intentions.
Toronto writer and cultural commentator Lynn Crosbie writes the Pop Rocks column for The Globe and Mail.