Quotes of the Day
In 1952 a promising young pitching prospect out of Washington and Lee University showed up for a tryout with the New York Giants (the baseball Giants, that is — they hadn't yet decamped for San Francisco). The prospect made a decent showing: three innings, three men on base, no runs scored. Good screwball, nice sinker, not much heat. "If somebody had offered me a Class D professional contract," says the prospect — whose name was Tom Wolfe — many decades later, "I would have gladly put off writing for a couple of decades."
But the Giants cut Wolfe after two days, and he became a giant of another kind. Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era. With books like The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities, he has built a towering reputation both as a journalist and as a novelist, scoring both literary acclaim and commercial success in the process. He has hung out with Black Panthers and astronauts. He has feuded with John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving simultaneously.
|
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
Now, in his new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 676 pages), Wolfe has set himself the challenge of chronicling youthful hedonism on a college campus. But at 73, can Wolfe party with the frat boys? Or has America finally outrun its most tireless chronicler?
In uptown Manhattan, perched on a sofa in his sumptuous apartment, with its housekeeper and its blue baby grand and its views of Central Park, Wolfe in person is a sharp contrast to his personality on the page. His prose bristles with italics and exclamation points and repetitions — repetitions!--for emphasis, but Wolfe himself speaks softly, slowly and a little hoarsely, with the ruins of a long-ago Virginia accent. He has always been dapper, but now he is a dapper old man. His appearance is not so much wolfish as avian: his frame is slight, his nose hooked and beaky, his mischievous smile a little snaggle-toothed. His hair is midlength and floppy, à la David Spade. He still wears his trademark white suit, accessorized with some kind of high-gloss old-timey shoes, but it hangs a little loose on him. When he reads small print he dons a pair of white-framed glasses.
Wolfe's previous novel, A Man in Full, published in 1998, took him 11 long years to finish, and when he was finally through, he wasted no time looking around for fresh territory. He likes to portray himself as a literary opportunist: in his 1989 manifesto "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," he scolded American novelists for writing minimalist, self-conscious little books when there's so much rich, strange, documentary material out there. "They don't want to see the world," he has said, "they want to suck their thumbs." After A Man in Full, it occurred to Wolfe, who had a daughter at Duke, that the lives of college students were a trove of good stuff — there is, he points out, no really great novel about campus life from the student's point of view. "The whole business of the co-ed dorm fascinated me. What does go on? Because all these children assure their parents, 'It's just the way it was when you were in college.'"
It was thus that, in his eighth decade, Tom Wolfe swapped his white suit for a less conspicuous blue blazer and set out on a tour of college campuses in search of Charlotte Simmons. "I went to fraternity parties," he recalls. "Very few of the students had any idea who I was. I was so old, and I always wore a necktie — I must have seemed somewhat odd to them." He trekked from Stanford to Ann Arbor, from Chapel Hill to the University of Florida in Gainesville. "The most valuable things were having people tell you about things like sex. I didn't see any," he adds hastily. What he did see was a kind of boot camp where teenagers are initiated into the social matrices of sex and power against the autumnal backdrop of what Wolfe describes as "the gradual — maybe not so gradual — disappearance of conventional morality."
So who, exactly, is Charlotte Simmons? Wolfe's heroine is a freshman at prestigious, fictional Dupont University in Philadelphia. They don't come much fresher than Charlotte. A native of tiny, remote Sparta, N.C., the brilliant, virginal Charlotte arrives at Dupont full of dewy ambition, expecting to live "a life of the mind." Instead, she encounters charming, predatory frat boys like the handsome Hoyt Thorpe; jock demigods like basketball star Jojo Johanssen; and icy prep-school snobs like her roommate, the bitchy Groton grad Beverly. Instead of an ivory tower, she finds a status-obsessed, intellectually bankrupt sexual romper room. Will she hold to her ideals or be dragged down into the beer-soaked mud?
I Am Charlotte Simmons isn't like Wolfe's other novels. For one thing, he sticks largely to one setting, the Dupont campus — he's not doing his city-hopping, class-transcending billion-footed-beast act, which is impressive but gave his earlier books a certain overstuffed lumpiness. Charlotte Simmons adheres more to the Aristotelian unities — time, place and action — and thus hangs together more neatly. It's a much more personal novel than the earlier ones. Not unlike Wolfe, Charlotte is a permanent outsider, a lonely observer. Wolfe's books are usually more about setting than character, but Charlotte's delicately drawn highs and lows give the book an unexpectedly tender heart. "I went through a bout of depression myself," he says, "and that's why I felt I knew exactly how she would feel. As I look back on it, there's a lot of me in Charlotte."
No one can read Charlotte Simmons without picking nits. There was a time when Wolfe was a pioneer, reporting back to straight America from the exotic island of radical youth culture in books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, but nowadays American culture and youth culture are basically the same thing, and it's Wolfe who looks a little behind the times. He leans heavily on catchphrases from such movies as Swingers ("You're money, baby") to give his dialogue a contemporary vibe. There are missteps: What self- respecting black hoopster would say of a Caucasian opponent, however stalwart, "That white boy's got heart"? And are college kids really still into 90210 and Animal House? They certainly don't have PlayStation3s, as such a machine does not, at press time, exist. Sometimes Wolfe has the air of a benevolent, fastidious Martian, as when he expends several sentences explaining the nature and function of what we humans call a StairMaster.
But these nits, once picked, should be discarded and forgotten. What remains is a rich, wise, absorbing and irresistible novel. Wolfe does things with words — exhilarating, intoxicating, impossible things — that no other writer can do. Take this example, from the second page of the book, in which frat boy Hoyt stares at himself in the mirror, dead drunk: "A gale was blowing in his head. He liked it. He bared his teeth. He had never seen them quite this way before. So even! So white! They vibrated from perfection. And his square jaw ... that chin with the perfect cleft in it ... his thick, thatchy light brown hair ... those brilliant hazel eyes ... his! Right there in the mirror — him!" To read it is to feel both the dizzy joy of intoxication and the impending hangover, not through anything Wolfe tells us but from the altered, manic rhythms of the prose alone.
Wolfe does not thunder in I Am Charlotte Simmons. He allows us to be as shocked or as blase as we want to be about the anonymous campus couplings he describes. "In my mind, it's just what's there," he says. "I must say, I pride myself on the fact that I don't think anybody can find a political agenda, a moral agenda. I insist that I am objective." Up to a point, that is — he'll bend the truth for the sake of a good line. "I had a groupie at the end deliver what I thought was a quite cogent remark," he recalls. "'Every girl wants to f___ a star. Every girl.' My daughter said, 'Nobody talks like that, Dad.'" This time his grin is a little lupine. "But I left it in."
I Am Charlotte Simmons will get attention for the smutty scenes, of which there are a generous but judicious number (he considered and then omitted a scene involving what he nicely terms, in his courtly Virginia accent, a "gang bang"). But Wolfe's interest is not prurient. His real subject is the nature of identity, of the individual soul (Charlotte's in particular), and whether or not it can survive uncorrupted in the acid storm of sex and alcohol and power and peer pressure into which we ritually plunge our young in the name of higher education. The answer he arrives at is not simple. Some get their comeuppance in Charlotte Simmons, and some are redeemed, but Charlotte's fate is a surprise, and not everybody will find it a pleasant one. Wolfe may be getting old, but he's not getting soft.
- Lev Grossman