By Tom Wolfe
Vintage Books, 771 pages
Available at Powerbooks
I’m not the first to notice a connection between Tom Wolfe’s latest novel and the adminis-tration of US President George W. Bush. Wolfe’s book takes place at a Southern university where privileged students contemplate their elite status, even as they bemoan the entry of more "diverse" types to their hallowed halls. The new kid on the block is Charlotte Simmons, a poor gal from the North Carolina mountains who wins a full scholarship, and stands at the center of sexual hijinks that seem to foreshadow a recent rape case at Duke University.
It’s not quite Ivy League, but the fictional Dupont University seems clearly modeled on Duke, maybe with a few other learning institutions – like Bush’s Yale – thrown in for extra measure. On the surface, the sex angle may recall US President Bill Clinton; but what has drawn the Bush comparisons in Wolfe’s latest brick-sized novel is its depiction of the party atmosphere on American campuses. Bush, a recovered alcoholic, has often been painted as the "partying" president, the guy who was reportedly AWOL for National Guard duty during the Vietnam War, whose daughters have been pulled over on DWI (driving while intoxicated) charges, and who approaches G-8 meetings like the head of a frat, calling out "Yo, Blair!" and squeezing the shoulders of female chancellors.
Bush perhaps sees the world as very chummy and friendly and frat-like, but this is because he doesn’t often get around to visiting people who don’t see it his way (Cindy Sheehan, for instance, the mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq who has camped out near the president’s Texas vacation home, and whom Bush has declined to meet). And this is partly what Wolfe’s novel focuses on: the exclusive, often unapologetic world of the American elite, and a worldview often seen as arrogant.
What was Vance so squirrelly about? He was a Dupont man himself. Hoyt once more gazed lovingly upon the moon-washed kingdom out there. The great library tower… the famous gargoyles, plainly visible in silhouette on the corner of Lapham College… way over there, the dome of the basketball arena… the new glass-and-steel neuroscience center, or whatever it was – even that weird building looked great at this moment… Dupont! Science – Nobel winners! whole stacks of them!… although he couldn’t exactly remember their names… Athletes– giants! national basketball champions! top five in football and lacrosse! … although he found it a bit dorky to go to games and cheer a lot… Scholars– legendary! … even though they were sort of spectral geeks who floated around the edges of collegiate life… Traditions– the greatest! – mischievous oddities passed from generation to generation of… the best people! A small cloud formed– the rising number of academic geeks, book humpers, homosexuals, flute prodigies, and other diversoids who were now being admitted… Nevertheless! There’s their Dupont, which is just a diploma with "Dupont" written on it… and there’s the real Dupont– which is ours!
Not just Bush comes to mind here. Nearly every US president of the 20th century attended an Ivy League college. But while Clinton was perhaps a hillbilly deep down inside, he was also an Oxford-educated world leader on the outside; Bush Jr. is, by design, the opposite: an elite-educated blueblood who acts like an uncouth frat boy in public.
It’s an undemocratic reality that money and a life of privilege are pretty much a prerequisite for living in the White House. And it’s not really startling that the products of academic institutions which are havens of exclusivity end up producing graduates who see the world in exclusive terms: Us versus them. Freedom versus terrorism. Good versus evil.
I Am Charlotte Simmons makes for lively commentary on modern America, as does all of Wolfe’s writing. He is still a sharp chronicler of status, collecting various specimens of pop culture, national buzzwords and trends like a lepidopterist chasing down butterflies.
Some novelists (John Updike and John Irving, to name two) have complained that Wolfe’s style lacks the combed elegance of great fiction; that he still, in fact, writes lengthy sentences filled with exclamation points and extra punctuation, a style not too dissimilar from the one he used in his classic journalistic work, like The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
But I recall when Wolfe’s first novel came out – The Bonfire of the Vanities, back in the late ’80s. I was working at a Barnes & Noble in Boston, and at the end of every afternoon, a line of yuppies would form, each clutching a crisp $20 bill and a paperback copy of Wolfe’s book (for the commute ride home, presumably). Wolfe must have been doing something right.
In I Am Charlotte Simmons, he takes his time laying out the atmosphere of Dupont – its basketball culture, its party life and its recklessness – but, in this age of "maximalist" fiction, the more reality the better. Reading this novel, one rarely gets the sense that Wolfe is sitting in a cozy office, pulling images and details out of his butt; no, he still seems like the tireless, white-clad journalist, summoning up the history and geography of Sparta, North Carolina (the mountain hills where Simmons hails from), or lassoing the latest in NCAA draft terms (like "donging" – the practice whereby eager recruiters and corporate sponsors take adjacent urinal stalls next to up-and-coming players, to make their pitches while they pee).
Through sheer exertion, Wolfe drags us into this world of US campus life, circa 2006, where learning is far down the list of priorities for students who have been groomed for the Ivy League from the day their parents conceived them.
America’s liberal arts campuses are often depicted as lush, idyllic places, and they can be; but the modern world has also transformed them into tribal worlds where tomorrow’s leaders cast a watchful eye on the "have-nots" and "diversoids," knowing they will have to tolerate such annoyances to make their way in the world.
But it could have all been so different, so much better. Imagine if such institutions produced young people who were smart and idealistic, realistic and yet humanistic at the same time. This is the dream and promise of a liberal arts education, but in an age of name-brand degrees, this dream and promise is largely dead. Societal pressure – not just in the US – makes such naïveté seem dangerous and misguided. A post-911 world can’t afford to be too pie-in-the-sky, or at least that’s the current thinking. Read Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons to see how such thinking is cemented in place.