Review: I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (original) (raw)

I Am Charlotte Simmons
by Tom Wolfe
676pp, Cape, £20

After studying for a doctorate at Yale, Tom Wolfe famously changed course and became a journalist - a New Journalist, pursuing the rough beast of 1960s America (the fashions, the drugs, the biker gangs, the radical chic) and accusing the "frustrated and unreadable" novelists immured in academe of betraying their vocation. Later, Wolfe became a novelist himself, to show his peers how Dickensian social realism should be done. Now he has raised the stakes again, by setting his new novel in an American university, as though to say: "All this stuff is happening on campus which you guys are too blind or stupid to notice - so it'll have to be me, an outsider, who tells the story". The cloistered setting isn't as remote from his previous two novels as first appears. Dupont University is affluent and Ivy League, and its top graduates go on to be masters of Wall Street, like Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities. Dupont also venerates sports stars and pumped-up physiques - the billionaire hero of A Man in Full , Charlie Croker, might have played his football there. But this time Wolfe's main protagonist is a sweet girl undergraduate, Charlotte Simmons, an ingenue from the mountains of North Carolina. And rather than hubris driving the plot (male overreachers getting their comeuppance), this is a tale of despoiled female innocence, a rape of Lucrece or a Clarissa.

It begins page-turningly enough, with Charlotte's valedictory address at high school and her wide-eyed arrival among Dupont's sycamore groves and velvet lawns. She is a poor girl, on a full scholarship, with $500 to last her all semester, and despite her academic self-confidence ("her inexpressible conviction that she would be the most brilliant student at this famous university"), humiliation swiftly sets in. Her snooty room-mate Beverly scarcely acknowledges her; the few clothes she owns aren't right for the designer-sloppiness of student life; her prim excursions to the co-ed dorm bathroom - in pyjamas, slippers and a Scottish plaid polyester flannel bathrobe - expose her to undreamt-of moral turpitude: "the vulgarity, the rudeness, the impudence, the virtual nudity - people parading around in towels ... Charlotte was more than appalled. She was frightened."

It gets worse. Students drink, she finds. And play loud music. And skip classes. And stay up late. And even have sex. Everyone in the world knows this, even without seeing National Lampoon's Animal House. But it comes as quite a shock to Charlotte, whose moral universe is the 50s and who'd imagined Dupont as a place of noble intellectual striving. Her problem is how to find a niche without succumbing to the general grossness. And though she makes friends with a couple of girls as lost as she is, it's boys who seem to promise salvation. Three are eager to hook up with her, each representing a different faction of campus life: Adam, the awkward boffin, an associate of the student newspaper, whom she'd like to fancy but can't; Hoyt, the manipulative and predatory hedonist, whom she can't help fancying though she knows she ought not to; and JoJo, the jock, the token white on the college basketball team, whom she might get round to fancying if only he didn't act so dumb. Despite the title this isn't just Charlotte's story, and when Wolfe inhabits the consciousness of his male characters - with their rivalry, preening, vengefulness and violence - he does it with gusto. He's especially good on JoJo, and how the college system is skewed to accommodate sports players, who have groupies to take care of their libidos and soft course-options to keep up their grades (geology - rocks for jocks; economics - stocks for jocks; and so on). When JoJo turns in an essay that's blatantly not his, his teacher, Mr Quat, vows to fight the system. But characters whose surnames begin with Q aren't usually good guys, and there's more to JoJo than meets the eye. Mens sana in corpore sano. Practically everyone at Dupont seems to work out, the girls so as to look fashionably anorexic, the boys to flaunt abs, traps, delts, pecs, lats and all the rest.

Wolfe is a diligent researcher and among those he thanks in his foreword are the "two collegians" (his children, presumably) who helped him out with student idiom, the likes and whatevers and totally awesomes and wanna chills. Early on there's a riff on what Wolfe calls "fuck patois", whereby the f-word is used in a variety of ways - as a verb, noun, adjective, adverb and imperative - though rarely to denote sexual intercourse. Later there's a similar lecture on shit patois. Dupont is rich in coinages. First-year women students are frostitutes or fresh meat. To be sexiled is to clear out while your room-mate goes to bed with someone. Swimmies are the reserve sports players whose academic excellence guarantees an overall C-grade for the team and thereby keeps it afloat. As usual, the energy of Wolfe's prose is abetted by stylistic tricks - block capitals, aposiopesis, italics, paragraphs that begin with dashes - and by wry observations on changing social manners: "At Dupont, nobody asked anybody out on a date unless they were already spending most nights in each other's beds." With the heroine, though, things never really take off. One can imagine her being played by the prim Reese Witherspoon of Cruel Intentions, Roger Kumble's remake of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, one of any number of films about youthful decadence that might have inspired Wolfe - except that Charlotte is so desperately lacking in spirit. "No one likes a goody two-shoes," her room-mate warns, and though she isn't actively dislikable her innocence strains credulity. It's page 200 before she risks going to a frat party, page 360 before she experiments with necking, and page 450 before she swigs vodka. Even after that, drunk on the dance floor, she's shocked to see boys "thrusting their montes pubis - who in this room would know the plural of mons pubis ... other than ... Charlotte Simmons? - thrusting them so hard into their dates, the girls were practically lifted off the floor".

The question for Lovelace, in Clarissa, is whether female virtue is more than prudishness: "whether her frost be frost indeed". But Charlotte isn't part of a chastity cult, or a churchgoer, and we know she'll lose her cherry sooner or later. The problem is how much later: the seduction comes when the novel is three-quarters done, by which time her naivety has long become cloying ("ohmygod! In her whole life she had never actually seen such a thing in such a state ... it looked like a heavy ball-peen hammer"). However squalid her violation, however betrayed and depressed she feels, one's instinctive response is: get over it, Charlotte.

Reading Wolfe can be as guilty a pleasure as reading Kingsley Amis: the mimicry, the liberal-baiting, the political incorrectness. But when Amis explored the same theme in Take a Girl Like You 40-odd years ago he came up with a more winning heroine in Jenny Bunn. Charlotte remains a coy cypher, Wolfe's vehicle for registering his affront at the sexualisation of modern society and the dumbing-down of university. In using her this way, he too exploits her - and there's something distinctly icky about the violation scene itself, where the point of view is supposed to be hers but feels like that of a voyeur-outsider. Smart as he is, Wolfe embeds a kind of self-critique in the text, by having a student feminist called Camille complain that men, when they talk about sex, still fetishise female sexual innocence. And there's a great deal more to this novel than Charlotte, including race, neuroscience, rap music and a running analogy between the modern American university and the class divisions of medieval Europe. But there's no set-piece to rival the Saddlebags scene in A Man in Full or the dachshund scraping its toenails on the pavement in Bonfire of the Vanities. Worse, there's no depth in the central figure.

Wolfe has always been more surface than depth, which is why other novelists of his generation (Mailer, Updike, John Irving) have dismissed him as a mere journalist. But at best he is a brilliant caricaturist, and the more America has become a self-caricature the more we've turned to him for instruction as well as entertainment. With I Am Charlotte Simmons, though, he tells us little or nothing we didn't already know. In a week of disappointment, here is one more.

· Blake Morrison's Things My Mother Never Told Me is published by Vintage.