The Mac Weekly

Issue date: 4/11/08 Section: The Arts

Media Credit: www.manolomen.com For a Wolfe, Tom is pretty foxy.

When I first stumbled upon Tom Wolfe's 2004 novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," I checked it out expecting a critique of the triviality of college. It is just that. Wolfe did his homework, going out and researching terms like "floorcest" and "getting head." However, the aging journalist/novelist's recent conservative bent shows. "I Am Charlotte Simmons," while bringing up good talking points on today's college scene, is unreasonably harsh in its portrayal of the hedonism of students.

The plot of the novel consists mainly of Charlotte Simmons' personal journey through freshman year at the fictional Dupont University, which is loosely based mainly on Duke but also on Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania. The three Men Who Would Get With Charlotte-a frat boy, a basketball star and a nerd-also take up a lot of the narrative space.

Essentially, Charlotte is a ridiculously na've yet somehow staggeringly brilliant backcountry girl from North Carolina. She is apparently stunningly beautiful yet unaware of this, as well as extremely conservative despite her very extensive reading in English and French. While at first appalled by Dupont's excesses, she eventually falls into the party scene, intrigued by her effect on men. Through her little-used feminine wiles, she draws a basketball star out of the court and onto a more academic path and causes the nerd to fall in love with her. Unfortunately for her, she is also taken to a frat formal by the frat boy, named Hoyt Thorpe, who promptly gets her wasted and takes her virginity. Her shame at being so used leads her on a quest for redemption that ends up with her dating the basketball star, and everyone lives happily ever after, except the evil frat boy who is exposed by the nerd for an unrelated subplot involving fellatio and a fictional governor of California.

The plot isn't terrible but it is a bit excessive. This review would have been out probably two weeks ago were it not for the 676 pages of Wolfeian prose. Nonetheless, there is a lot to talk about in this novel. For starters, the characters. Charlotte herself strikes me as improbable. She is at once ignorant and chaste yet very, very well-read and good-looking. This balance of character traits seems a little unlikely, and her "mama's little girl" attitude feels too contrived. Hoyt Thorpe is also a two-dimensional character, all frat boy antics and lust, but he's less off-base than the also two-dimensional virgin nerd or the basketball star. The rest of the students at Dupont are usually stupid, grunting guys who chase blondes around the quad-this seriously happens in every chapter-or loser-types who hole up in the library or gossip in the hallways.

Continued...

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