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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 blasé 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.