School Days

Not really. With his latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe has produced a satisfying if slightly old-fashioned story of a young person’s education and growth–“old-fashioned” referring here only to the kind of book Wolfe has written, since in previous bildungsromane, from The Sorrows of Young Werther all the way down to Stover at Yale, you won’t find either Tom Wolfe’s trademark prose or the details of oral sex, coed toilets, more oral sex, and occasional classwork that he discovered on America’s college campuses. I Am Charlotte Simmons takes the theme that romance died the day easy sex was born, which Wolfe chronicled in his 2000 collection of essays, Hooking Up, and splays it like a honeytrap across a girl’s path as she tries to travel from an evangelical childhood, isolated in a town called Sparta way back up in the North Carolina hill country, to an Ivy League education at the fictional Dupont University.

The eponymous heroine Charlotte Simmons may imagine her scholarship to Dupont will show her the life of the mind, but it’s the life of the party she soon discovers college is about. She becomes interested in neuropsychology and does well in class–at first, that is. But then she meets Adam, a nerd who writes for a campus paper, and Jojo, the school’s sole Caucasian basketball star, and Hoyt, the preppy fraternity brother and big man on campus.

As in every novel about undergraduates, the adults come off poorly. That’s how it’s supposed to be in such books, and the teachers, coaches, administrators, and visiting speakers in I Am Charlotte Simmons are all on the make, in one way or another.

But Wolfe doesn’t let the children off, either. They are really at school to be socialized, the author realizes, and the posturings, connivings, seductions, pseudo-adulteries, and struggles for social dominance are all practice for adulthood.

The plotlines of the self-deceiving Charlotte’s three suitors begin to draw together when Hoyt punches out the bodyguard of California’s governor. The governor is a rising conservative political star who is on campus to give a speech–and he is, naturally, receiving oral sex from a coed as Hoyt stumbles upon him. Skinny little Adam wants to use the story to make his name as a muckraking journalist, but Adam has his own troubles, since his work-study job, tutoring the basketball team, seduced him into writing a term paper for Jojo, and the scandal is starting to dribble out. Bringing all this home in the story’s conclusion, the author shows he’s solved the plot-construction problems that weakened the endings of his first two novels, Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full. With I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe has produced a solid, well-reported page-turner.

You wouldn’t know it from the early reviews. Princeton’s Elaine Showalter is a typical example, howling in the Chronicle of Higher Education that Wolfe is a Peeping Tom, cruel to the professors and envious of the students’ sex lives. Worse, he doesn’t understand how revolutionary all that sex is–how feminism has set these young women free to discover their sexuality. It may look to old men like the seventy-three-year-old Wolfe to involve mostly pretty girls socialized into servicing young men on demand, but that’s because I Am Charlotte Simmons is a “leering” book. It’s the author, not his characters, who shows just how “bitchy” and “status-seeking” a person can be.

THERE’S AN ENVY to Tom Wolfe’s usual run of detractors, of course, but something more than envy–a resentment, an ache, a fury: If I could write like that, a small cat snarls inside each of their heads, I’d . . . I’d change things in this rabid, racist, right-wing world. I’d zola the rich bastards until they burbled for mercy. I’d dickens the corporate polluters until they drowned themselves in their own sick sludge. I’d thackeray, I’d balzac, I’d dostoyevsky everyone who doesn’t get it–it, IT, the ineffable IT of political conscience, the mystical rightness that lets a Princeton professor be a revolutionary and, well, a Princeton professor at the same time. God–or Charles Darwin, maybe, or some freak of perverse genetics–put a sword in Tom Wolfe’s hands, and the oblivious creep won’t use it to smite the ungodly. The man doesn’t deserve his sentences. Prose belongs to us, by divine right and right of conquest. And here comes this white-suited fake dandy, this reporter, to set up camp right in the middle of it, like John Ashcroft–or Gary Bauer or, I don’t know, Elmer Gantry–buying the prettiest summer house on Martha’s Vineyard.

Besides, he doesn’t know what a novel is. Here we get down, if not to the reason for the complaint, then at least to a bone with some meat on it, for Tom Wolfe doesn’t, in fact, know what a novel is. That’s ridiculous to say, of course. He’s written three of them now, each one an automatic bestseller and each one guaranteed to start a national conversation. What more do you need from a book? But there’s something else a novel wants to do, some place a novel itself wants to go–some feature a novelist like Saul Bellow can’t help incorporating even in a bad book like Ravelstein, and Tom Wolfe can’t quite find even in a good book like Bonfire of the Vanities.

NOT THAT I Am Charlotte Simmons entirely lacks novelistic touches, though what makes a novel novelistic is hard to say. Well, maybe it’s not so hard. Look: Take the moment in Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister when the social interloper Ferdinand Lopez, finally exposed and disgraced, throws himself in front of a train, “knocked into bloody atoms,” at Tenway Junction–and the man from nowhere disappears back into nothingness. Yes, the irony is a little heavy-handed; yes, the completeness of it all, the clicking shut of the box, is a little too satisfactory. But Trollope couldn’t help himself. His plot wanted to do this kind of thing, and unless you’re Henry James, your best bet as an author is simply to get out of the way. So, in I Am Charlotte Simmons, when the insufferable frat-boy Hoyt at last gets his comeuppance, exposed in the school paper and refused the post-graduation job he’d been promised, he moans that he is “f–ed, f–ed, f–ed, and f–ed,” which is–how shall we say this?–rather what he had done to the formerly virginal Charlotte in the book’s longest and most painful scene.

But there’s another thing necessary to make a novel–a kind of presence that haunts the text and draws it together at a level deeper than plot. I don’t know how to define it, but look: Take the paragraph in the first chapter of Dickens’s David Copperfield, when the caul in which David was born is sold off at a church raffle as an infallible charm against drowning. I’d bet a fortune that Dickens didn’t plan anything with this incident. For that matter, we have his working notes for the novel, and we know he didn’t mean it. He was frantically scribbling to meet his deadlines for the serialized text, and he threw in the scene to fill up a paragraph and make a weak joke about the purchaser, an old lady who died triumphantly undrowned in her bed, though she never got closer to open water than crossing a bridge.

And yet, there it was, a detail stranded in chapter one, and Dickens, the greatest unconscious novelist of the English language, could feel it, somehow, haunting his story. Why is it no surprise that the church at David’s wedding, forty chapters later, is inexplicably filled with sailors? Why is it no coincidence that David ends up practicing law in one of those bizarre English inns of court whose jurisdiction is nautical and ecclesiastical matters? And when, at the novel’s climax, David finds the ruined Steerforth “drown-dead” on the beach with his failed rescuer Ham, like lost sons of Noah, we feel the deep currents of fiction, pulling the ark of the story out onto a theological sea.

EMILE ZOLA was the writer Tom Wolfe recommended as the best model in the widely noted 1989 essay in which he called for America’s novelists to leave their prissy, self-absorbed concerns and go out to report on this “wild, bizarre, unpredictable hog-stomping Baroque country of ours.” But he mentioned Dickens along the way, and Dickens is the author to whom he is, in fact, the closest–if only because a Wolfe novel is invariably what Henry James once called books like Dickens’: “large loose baggy monsters.”

I Am Charlotte Simmons is tighter than Bonfire of the Vanities–much tighter than A Man in Full–but in all his fiction, Tom Wolfe can’t help but sprawl, and sprawl and sprawl, just the way Dickens does. Dickens will always waste a page describing an inn, if his characters happen to wander into one, and Wolfe will always describe the “alarmingly detailed color photographs of the house specials” in the restaurants his characters chance to enter: “huge plates with slabs of red meat and gigantic patties of ground meat fairly glistening with . . . ooze . . . great molten slices of cheese, veritable lava flows of gravy, every manner of hash brown and french-fried potato, fried onion and fried chicken, including a dish called Sam’s Sweet Chickasee, which seemed to consist of an immense patty of skillet-fried ground chicken beneath a mantle of bubbling cream sauce.”

But, then, Dickens learned how to write a novel by reading the loose-jointed picaresques of eighteenth-century English fiction–Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker, Fielding’s Tom Jones–and onto their sprawl he forced the thematic depth and symbolic unity that became the definition of the Victorian novel. Wolfe learned how to write in the series of coruscating essays he collected in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and The Pump House Gang, the apotheosis of the 1960s “new journalism.”

Those essays had a prose so fast it almost scorched you. “Right this minute, one supposes, he is somewhere there in the innards of those 48 rooms,” he wrote in a 1965 piece about visiting Hugh Hefner at the Playboy mansion, “under layers and layers of white wall-to-wall, crimson wall-to-wall, Count Basie-lounge leather, muffled, baffled, swaddled, shrouded, closed in, blacked out, shielded by curtains, drapes, wall-to-wall, blond wood, screens, cords, doors, buzzers, dials, Nubians–he’s down in there, the living Hugh Hefner, 150 pounds, like the tender-tympany green heart of an artichoke.”

It was a prose straining with voice–more voice than English writing had heard at least since the 1950s, when Dylan Thomas’s reminiscences in A Child’s Christmas in Wales taught a generation of writers just how much could be done with run-on sentences, and maybe since the 1910s, when G.K. Chesterton taught readers just how pointed with antitheses the English language could be. In Tom Wolfe’s young hands, what counted was speed–a compulsive impulse, an excitement roaring through the essay, refusing to allow the tugged-along reader to realize how many thousands of words were spilling across the page.

Gradually, from his 1968 report on Ken Kesey’s LSD adventures in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to his 1987 transition to fiction in The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe toned down the signature tricks of his early writing: the bouncing sentence fragments, the multiple exclamation points, the nests of ellipses, the spume of interjected half-quotations–Zowie! Ka-boom! Craash! –that the reader was never sure were coming from the author or his subject. But the prose remained, and remains in I Am Charlotte Simmons, detail-driven and focused on the precise touches that mark social distinctions.

Well, why not? It’s not as though many other novelists are doing it, and Tom Wolfe is still the best social reporter since William Makepeace Thackeray. In the early scene in which Charlotte’s hick parents meet the wealthy, sophisticated parents of her roommate at freshman orientation, or the scene in which Jojo becomes conscious of the ease with which the black members of his basketball team move and talk, or the scene in which Hoyt and his fraternity brothers discuss their clothes, Wolfe provides details no other writer these days can even approach.

But those details somehow lack the deeper coherence, the Dickensian imagination that pulls a baggy monster together. I Am Charlotte Simmons has its genuinely novelistic themes. There’s the intersection of neurology and social reinforcement in the mainstreaming of open sex, for example, signaled in the book’s epigraph, a brief description of the work that won a Nobel Prize for a psychologist from Dupont University. And there’s the abiding interest in masculinity, a bell rung repeatedly by chapters ending with the word “man.”

The trouble is that big themes aren’t quite enough, any more than Trollopian plot satisfaction is quite enough. All of Wolfe’s details, the sharp observations snapped out in lightning prose: They want to do something that Charles Dickens could let them do and Tom Wolfe cannot. They want to cohere, they want to inform one another, they want to hook up.

We could do some deep think here about the cultural and linguistic advantages Dickens had in a Victorian world in which you didn’t actually have to deflower your heroines on stage; we’ve clearly lost some shared social intelligence that once helped the novel along, and the level of naiveté–the level of virginity, for that matter–that I Am Charlotte Simmons needs in its heroine to build an undergraduate bildungsroman probably doesn’t exist anymore. But perhaps the point can be made well enough simply by observing that Tom Wolfe is America’s greatest living novelist. Kind of.

Joseph Bottum is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard.