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I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe, part I

It has been a long time since I’ve read a book that was so good that I didn’t want to do anything else but read it until I was finished with it. But along came I am Charlotte Simmons which I started reading aboard an Amtrak train on Thanksgiving morning, and 676 pages later I finally finished it on Monday evening.

Tom Wolfe’s third novel is at least as good, if not better, than his first, Bonfire of the Vanities, and is head and shoulders above A Man In Full. Anyone who has read the first two novels will recognize the framework of Charlotte Simmons. Once again, Tom Wolfe tells the story of several individuals whose lives become intertwined. Each chapter is written from the point of view of one of his main characters, but always Tom Wolfe’s point of view is also there.

Even though there are similarities, Tom Wolfe took a big stretch with this book. In his previous novels, he wrote about the hidden worlds of real estate development, investment banking, and the Bronx DA’s office. (I remember serving an internship at the Queens County District Attorney’s Office, and everyone said how accurately Tom Wolfe captured what it’s like to be a DA in one of New York City’s outer boroughs.) In his previous novels, his main characters were men, but this time, the main character in his book is an eighteen year old girl attending fictional Dupont University (think Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Duke). What a stretch for a man of 73 to put himself into the mind of an eighteen year old girl. I can’t help but imagine that life in the college dorms was more alien to Tom Wolfe than any other place he ever visited.

But because so many more people are familiar with college, or at least think they are, Tom Wolfe has opened himself up to a lot more criticism. And the criticism has come in droves. It seem like every professional reviewer has been determined to completely trash this book, and even the amateur reviewers at Amazon.com have been highly critical.

The first notable bad review, written by Michiko Kakutani, was published in The New York Times two weeks before the book was even released to the public. How eager the critics were to trash this book before anyone even had a chance to read it.

Michiko wrote, “This time, instead of boldly going where few writers have gone before, he gives us some tiresomely generic if hyperbolic glimpses of student life at a fictional school . . .” The implication is that books like this are being written every day, but I can’t think of any book similar to Charlotte Simmons, and certainly Michiko doesn’t name any in her review. Maybe she’s just jealous of Tom Wolfe’s mastery of the English language, his gift for turning ordinary scenes into the fantastic, and his ability glue his readers to the pages of books where nothing much really seems to happen.

Michiko also wrote, “. . . in the course of a very long 676 pages [, Tom Wolfe] serves up the revelation -- yikes! -- that students crave sex and beer, love to party, wear casual clothes and use four-letter words.” Yes, this is a common complaint from many of the critics. Everyone knows that college is about sex and beer, what’s new here? But does everyone really believe that life at an elite school (think Ivy League) is really like it’s depicted in Charlotte Simmons?

Yes, we’ve all seen the movie Animal House. (At least we adults who read blogs have seen it. Charlotte Simmons obviously didn’t see it. We imagine that her religious mother didn’t let her watch R rated movies.) But Animal House is a parody, it’s not real. The scenes in Charlotte Simmons are a lot more powerful than Animal House because they are real scenes.

But some people don’t think this is real. In one of the ironies of the negative reviews, while some like Ms Kakutani say “duh! of course that’s what’s happening at colleges,” other reviews criticize the book for being unrealistic. In another review in the New York Times, Jacob Weisberg says that this is a “comic book version of college” and not the real thing.

And I really love this quote from a reviewer at Amazon.com:

If you're a parent getting ready to send a child off to college don't panic. "NOT ALL STUDENTS ARE LIKE THOSE REPERSENTED IN THIS BOOK." I am a mechanic that has made many service calls to several colleges. Most of my calls to colleges have been to Marquette University in Milwaukee Wisconsin. While I am aware that some of the students at this school could be those represented in this book, my experience is that most students are not like those represented in this book. Most of the students I have dealt at Marquette appear to take their chance at a college education as a serious privilege.

This guy thinks he has the expertise to say that Tom Wolfe has gotten college life at elite Ivy League schools wrong because he’s a mechanic who has visited a second rate Catholic school in Wisconsin.

In fact, Marquette University may very well be like the Dupont that Charlotte Simmons’ mother imagined, except with the students not being quite so bright. Marquette University would be the last place that privileged students from elite boarding schools would wind up attending. The students at Marquette are probably from middle class families who bring their conventional middle class values with them to college.

I’ve written about these conventional middle class values before in my essay Jessica Cutler and the values of Washington. This is an excerpt:

[T]here is a huge gap between how voters think people on Capitol Hill are behaving, and the way they really behave.

Why should there be such a gap? Didn’t people hear about Monica Lewinsky, Chandra Levy, and a variety of other Washington sex scandals? Shouldn’t they know by now that a large percentage of important and semi-important men in Washington are having sex with women in their twenties? Don’t they know by now that a large percentage of female interns and other low paid female workers in resume building jobs are the opposite of pure and virginal?

No, people don’t know this because it’s not what they want to believe. They want to believe that Washington is full of people who behave consistently with conventional middle class values. These values dictate that you should work hard, be honest, believe in God, be moderate in the consumption of alcohol, remain a virgin until you get married, and thereafter remain faithful to your spouse.

Tom Wolfe, being nearly as brilliant a sociologist as myself (and admittedly a ten times more brilliant writer), has written a book about the exact same conflict of values between the elite and the middle class that I previously wrote about in my blog.

I found a comment left at the blog Critical Mass that offers an excellent observation:

I think Wolfe is a lot more on the mark than older people would like to admit. Let's call it willful ignorance, but, having recently graduated college, I don't think people realize how morally, ethically and intellectually depraved a large swath of college students (and, coincidentally, the faculty) really are. Wolfe may be focusing just on one part of the population, but that population may be a plurality on most campuses (even the most respected ones). I knew plenty of people who never went to class, didn't do any work, drank had sex and did drugs in excess.....everything that runs counter to the "noble academic institution" most people believe college is and should be.

And here’s an excerpt from another review left at Amazon.com, which offers the best commentary that I have yet seen:

I am a huge Tom Wolfe fan who happens to be a girl from a small town who went to/ is still at the University of Pennsylvania. Let me tell you, his descriptions of college life are very accurate. I had thought, going to an Ivy League , I would be with the best and the brightest...I was not expecting to be stuck in a crazy puke-filled dorm where people act like animals, and are loud, drunk, and totally inconsiderate of those around them. To go from a town where people actually ACT like human beings to a college dorm like this is a sad, disappointing journey- one that is not always expected. At least it's not expected if you don't live around people who couldn't live without alcohol. It's NOT unrealistic for Wolfe to make Charlotte so innocent because that's how SOME decent college students are before they are exposed to vulgar, barbarian frat boys at college who do things MUCH worse than anything described in this book. To me, and to Charlotte, it is TRAGIC to go to a good school and see people who are such total drunk immature wastes, people who drag others down without thinking twice about it.

Unlike most reviews, here is one written by an actual college student at an actual elite institution who has come from a small town just like Charlotte Simmons did. And she says the book is dead on accurate.

The conclusion of Part I of my review of I am Charlotte Simmons is that the negative reviewers are wrong about the book’s take on campus life. It’s not a comic book look at college, but the real thing. And the hedonism of college life is absolutely not common knowledge among the middle class of America.

Read the second part of the review: I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe, part II.

posted Tuesday, November 30, 2004

1 Comments:

By limeonaire:

I'm posting as "Student Life" because that's the only Blogger account I have at hand. I generally prefer to go by limeonaire.

In any case, I must say "right on!" as far as your dual posts about I Am Charlotte Simmons and Tom Wolfe's take on college life is concerned. I'm currently a junior at one of those "elite" name-brand universities (or, at least, a university that desperately wants to establish itself as an elite name brand), Washington University in St. Louis. My freshman-year experience paralleled Charlotte's in many ways, especially insofar as I found myself utterly disenchanted and disappointed with the way my fellow students acted. Their ambitions are petty. Insincerity abounds. Tom Wolfe isn't caricaturing these students—they caricature themselves, modeling their ambitions after those of characters on MTV's "Real World" and the like.

I've never been as naive to the "facts of life," so to speak, as Charlotte was, but I really have been shocked by the lack of self-awareness and/or common decency I've seen evidenced in colleges like this. I'm from a middle class (actual middle class, not upper-middle class) suburb of St. Louis, I've never had cable TV, and my parents refused to let me watch R-rated movies (or many movies at all, for that matter) throughout my childhood and adolescence. I underwent a sort of intellectual conversion in high school and began reading voraciously as I hadn't done since childhood. I really did hope to find a place where the "life of the mind" was uplifted and glorified when I got to college...so despite a growing awareness of just how depraved today's students are, I was nonetheless greatly disappointed to come here and find that there weren't students here interested in becoming iconoclast philosophers or whatever it is I'd hoped for.

So many of the vignettes in Charlotte Simmons ring a bell here. The first freshman-year experience I can recall vividly was attempting to introduce myself to my next-door neighbors during move-in and being completely ignored as they continued their inane conversation about beer and the frats. It was a different world...

I can tell stories worse than Charlotte's, about my indifferent upper-middle-class, privately educated roommate with indie-rock pretensions, about the girls in the room on my right who between them drank gallons, screeched incessantly, claimed to have been in a "Girls Gone Wild" flick, only bedded frat boys, talked loudly about their sex lives while eternally drunken...about the guy who lived next to them, our class president, who hosted huge (illegal) drinking parties on our freshman floor while screaming of the punch, "It'll get you fucked up!!"...about the overly politically correct African-American girl who lived in the single on my left and seemed to be in an unhealthy relationship with a hulking white frat boy/football player several years older, who had such loud, moaning sex that it could be heard at the other end of the hall, to say nothing of my room... So many stories there, and so many omitted.

And so I just read Wolfe's novel over winter break, and found it depressingly accurate, as it explains exactly what's wrong with elite colleges these days—and yet the critics can't believe their eyes, choosing to lambaste Wolfe instead of accepting college as the tarnished, tawdry thing that it is. I think your assessment says exactly what I've been trying to put into words ever since I finished reading the book and then read what critics had to say.The only things I find at all inaccurate about this novel are the snippets of fake song lyrics Wolfe concocts and some of the slang, which feels like it came from students attempting to put one over on the guy. That aside, though...the novel validates my experiences as real, and even if no one believes it, I'm glad Wolfe had the temerity to explain how college really is to someone who doesn't come from the upper-middle class elite (the "bobos," as some have posited).

Sorry this comment is so long—I just felt like explaining how I feel about this novel to someone who seems to understand what Wolfe was getting at.

posted at 1/21/2005 4:35 AM