January 20, 2005

Tom Wolfe has this uncanny ability to see to the heart of things. You'd think he'd be unsympathetic to his characters, who tend to be unsavory people who bring their problems onto themselves, but he's not. That's one of the reasons he's so good at what he does.

In his latest novel, I am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe takes aim at the elite universities. It's pretty scary stuff. The young students going into them are now the "adults" coming out of them? These are the people now getting the best and most influential jobs? Yech.

You'd think--you'd hope--that these elite Eastern universities would produce world-famous scholars. Hardly. All colleges are hotbeds of drunkenness and drug use and sex (I went to college, too), but if Wolfe's depiction of these people is accurate--and I don't doubt that it is--please give me some students from Big Sky Jr. College in Sheepflock, Montana.

Charlotte is the story of a young, rather naive woman who is thrust headlong into college, and who unfortunately doesn't have a clue what she's getting into. And that's a shame, because she's a sweet kid out of some podunk town. Or so you think. As in life, people are not what they always appear to be at first.

You might cringe at what she goes through--appallingly drunken keggers, sports populated by dim-bulb athletes down with the expensive cars and bling-bling, promiscuous and often anonymous sex. She's adrift in what appears to be a sea of students who apparently never had a good time in their lives, and are trying to stuff all of it into the few years they're in college. Moderation? What's that?

The novel is set at the fictional college of Dupont University. Outwardly it's a place of beautiful lawns and impressive buildings. You get the impression students should be walking around in suits and ties. But--ha! ha!--your impression would be wrong! This is something out of a David Lynch movie!

Underneath that facade are sex-and-sports-crazed students barely able to keep up with their classwork, because they're too hung over. I and all my friends went through this stuff in high school--but but not nearly as bad as this--so when I got to college I was shaking my head at kids barfing up their beer while trying to order pizzas. Or engaging in drunken riots. But even my high school and college didn't hold a candle to what's going on in Wolfe's novel.

These students are supposed to be the cream of America's youth, the ones with nearly perfect SAT scores? Yet Charlotte, to her dismay, ends up with a roommate who spends her time lusting after athletes. She also encounters a guy with the unlikely name of Jojo Johanssen, a player on the university's much-worshiped basketball team, who spends his time trying to fend off other players trying to get his position on the team.

The characters are a bit overdone; indeed they're almost caricatures. And there are more cliques in college than nerds/jocks/frats, which is what Wolfe portrays. Then there's the problem of the 74-year-old author trying to put himself into the mind of 18-year-old Charlotte.

Obviously, in many ways Wolfe misses the mark. What's going on in his fictional college has been going on in real colleges since, well, there have been colleges. The author appears unduly shocked at what he's seen.

For all the book's flaws--and they are many--what it is ultimately about is students finding themselves in college. That's one of the things college is supposed to help them with. They used to do that, which is why we ended up with the term, in loco parentis. Then for years they didn't. Now, fortunately, they're starting to assume that role again.

College is for having a good time. It's also about coming of age. To a degree, it is about going insane for a while. But there is a limit, and as Wolfe points out, the limit has again been passed.

Some people in college not only don't find themselves, they lose what they had, the reason being, as the old saying tells us, vanity, vanity, all is vanity. This is what happens to many characters in the book; they lose what little they had. In a sense, they had "nothing," and lose even that.

Some of the characters in the novel never truly find themselves. I won't say which ones, but I will say one wag commented this book could have been called Bonfire of the Virtues, because the students' virtues, however superficial, have gone up in smoke. Only one person in the book turns out not to be morally reprehensible.

All in all, Wolfe's third novel is a very good one, but not a great one. Like everything he's written, it's very much worth reading.

Lew Rockwell See Bob's archives there.

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