Tom Wolfe’s University Novel: Worth Reading After All
By Mark Grueter
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These
days, it’s fashionable to dump on Tom Wolfe and his latest novel,
I am Charlotte Simmons; one is sure to score points with one’s
literary friends by roasting the old goat for “discovering”
sex and binge-drinking on college campuses. Even people who haven’t
bothered to read the tome nevertheless feel secure enough to dismiss it
as a hackneyed statement on the obvious.
For the scene in which hick/budding intellectual Charlotte Simmons loses her virginity to frat boy stallion Hoyt Thorpe, Wolfe won the “Bad Sex” award, handed out annually to the novelist who supposedly provides us with the “worst description of sex.” And it’s true that none of the brutishly technical sex scenes in Wolfe’s book can objectively be described as erotic. But as the novelist himself pointed out to those who issued the award, the scene was deliberately unerotic.
For Charlotte, it wasn’t just the first time she had sex, but the first time a guy had ever, say, unhooked her bra. It wasn’t just that she was a virgin; she seems to have skipped out on sex education altogether: ‘Do guys stick their tongues down there?’ or, better yet, ‘Why I am wet?’ The essential point to make here is that the relevant passage is actually not an embarrassingly poor description of sex, especially when one considers the intent of the Bad Sex award: “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”
Anyway, the infamous sex scene degenerates into something that reads more like a common, borderline rape scenario. After being stripped bare, Charlotte expresses her reservations to the gladiator Hoyt about going any further. He ignores her:
He thrust the ball-peen hammer right into her – and it went nowhere. He thrust again, with a grunt this time. Got nowhere. A wave of pain rose. Another thrust. Nowhere. “Ehhhhhhuhhh.” It hurt. He didn’t stop for an instant. He was as earnest as a battering ram. He thrust and broke through. She let out a yelp of pain and, more than pain, surprise, and more than pain and surprise, insult. The big thing was stuffed into her innards – her very innards! – and insult upon insult! – moving – in, out, in, out –
“Ow!” The insult, the insult!
Hoyt and the thing paused. “Are you okay?”
“Mmnnnnh,” she said, her eyes watering, wanting to say, “NO, IT’S NOT OKAY! THIS HURTS, THIS HURTS, THIS HURTS, THIS HURTS.
Luckily for the poor girl, Hoyt finishes quickly, rolls off her, strolls to the bathroom and yells out, “You need a towel?” No embrace, no consoling. The two then discover blood on the sheets, an unintended consequence of Hoyt’s impressive ramming, for which Charlotte sheepishly issues a “sorry.” Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to actually say No to Hoyt, but only out of guilt and fear of becoming known on campus as “the teasing bitch who lets a guy get worked up, worked up, worked up, and lies there naked as a jaybird, legs parted, and then waves a finger and says no-no-no-oh? Ohmygod what would that look like – would that bury Charlotte Simmons for good? Dead in the ground at Dupont with Loser and Prude and Tease on her headstone?” With this in mind, one might have thought the feminist movement and/or the social conservatives would have, by now, come to Wolfe’s defense. But that presumes, of course, that those types of people actually read.
It is Wolfe’s contention that we are all, in a total sense, products of our environment. The once-principled egghead Charlotte Simmons (perfect SAT scores) allows herself to be defiled by blue-blooded scumbag Hoyt Thorpe solely because she’s terrified of being rejected by her peers. A professor who Charlotte admires describes his theory of the “conscious little rock” -- which is the intellectual theme of the novel: “Let’s say you pick up a rock and throw it. And in midflight you give that rock consciousness and a rational mind. That little rock will have free will and will give you a highly rational account of why it has decided to take the route it’s taking.” This is more than simply a reportorial account of college life – it is a work of ideas.
To open the novel, Wolfe cites a scientific experiment in which the part of the brain that controls emotions in higher mammals is removed from thirty cats. For some reason, this procedure converted these “amygdalectomized” cats into “a state of sexual arousal hypermanic in the extreme…a cat mounted by another cat would be in turn mounted by a third cat, and that one by yet another, and so on, creating tandems as long as ten feet.” The experiment then placed thirty normal cats in the same room as the sex fiends, though separated in cages. Then something unexpected happened: “Over a period of weeks they (the control cats) had become so thoroughly steeped in an environment of hypermanic sexual obsession that behavior induced surgically in the amygdalectomized cats had been induced in the controls without any intervention whatsoever.” The scientist, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his demonstration, “had discovered that a strong social or “cultural” atmosphere…could in time overwhelm the genetically determined responses of perfectly normal, healthy animals.”
While
promoting the book, Wolfe talked about how many schools actually have
co-ed bathrooms, complete with open showers. No curtains or stalls, just
steam to hide behind. So, while reading the novel, I waited impatiently
for these scenes to materialize and for the scathing critique of this
sort of social engineering that would likely follow, but it strangely
never came. At the beginning of the semester, we are
told Charlotte avoids the bathrooms altogether by using a private sink
and toilet room nearby the lounge. We assume she eventually starts using
the bathrooms, but instead of detailing a shower scene, Wolfe focuses
on her dreadful ordeal of having to sit next to boys in the toilet stalls
as they giddily joke about the sounds and smells they emit on the can.
The painful affair of being so brutally deflowered by Hoyt throws Charlotte into a state of perfect depression. So tormented by the reflection, she isolates herself for the rest of the semester and stays steadfastly silent even as she returns to North Carolina and her parents over Winter break. She couldn’t even concentrate on the one thing she knew she was good at – school. And so her grades suffer and she winds up with a 2.1 GPA – astonishingly low for a girl accustomed to straight A’s. All this suggests a good deal of real-world experience is needed before entering college in order to handle – emotionally and psychologically - all of the inevitable challenges.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Charlotte Simmons is that it actually is, for the most part, an accurate depiction of college life from individual perspectives. For this reviewer, it certainly revived more dormant memories of that epoch than anything else I’ve read. For instance, the portrayal of the favorite, local campus bar scene is spot-on. And it certainly reminds me more of college than the slew of movies that deal with campus life in predictably sentimental or farcical and exaggerated ways. And even though Wolfe himself deals in stereotypes, he also effectively captures nuance and idiosyncrasy. Charlotte Simmons herself – enigmatic, contradictory – is, for my money, his most effectively drawn character to date.
Wolfe also succeeds in taking us through the life of the lonely college student. At the start of the semester, Charlotte finds solace only in her academic work:
Charlotte only wished she were still in the middle of the test! At least for that hour she was part of a group of human beings all doing the same thing. At least she had been completely engrossed in a task that made it impossible to think of...how lonesome she was.
Loneliness wasn’t just a state of mind, was it? It was tactile. She could feel it. It was a sixth sense, not in some fanciful play of words, but physically. It hurt…it hurt like phagocytes devouring the white matter of her brain. It wasn’t merely that she had no friends. She didn’t even have a sanctuary in which she could be simply alone.
Might these have been some of the thoughts going through the minds of those NYU students who plunged themselves to death from inside the Bobst library last year? No doubt Simmons is a work of social criticism. Wolfe highlights many issues that receive scant attention. For instance, he makes an important point not often talked about by liberals: that “diversity” on college campuses is more like “dispersity” or little more than a collection of segregated groups or cliques.
One cannot be too critical of the role athletics or “sports” play in our colleges or in indeed in society at-large. And Wolfe wastes no time with any apologies for the simple fact that “student-athletes” aren’t even allowed to take their academic work seriously. Any athlete who wants to succeed must shut their mind down and live, eat and breathe only their sport. One of Wolfe’s nerdy/erudite students asks,
What is it with this sports mania in the first place? Why does anybody get excited because Dupont is going to play Indiana in basketball? Either our hired mercenaries will beat their hired mercenaries, or vice versa. Why does anybody care?…Why does a game get students so emotionally involved? Or anybody else for that matter…It’s completely irrational.
Adam Gellin, a central character and an awkward brainiac who professes to Charlotte his love for her, interjects, “Irrational is right. It’s a primitive ritual of masculinity, and girls just go along with it because that’s where the boys are.” Adam is the guy Charlotte wishes she liked – because he’s smart and not bad looking – but, for whatever reason, she cannot bring herself to do so. This is where Wolfe reaches that level of realism he so openly aspires to. Against all logic and reason, Charlotte is drawn to a frat boy (Hoyt) and a jock (JoJo Johanssen, the guy she ends up with) instead.
I’m not a Tom Wolfe fan per se, in that as far as I can tell, he fails to evoke a real sense of either satire or irony, and I don't find his actual writing style particularly funny or engaging. Still, I thought Bonfire of the Vanities was fun, if unexceptional. And all of this aside, his novels are clearly written, thoroughly researched and insightful enough to be compelling; whether or not what he writes amounts to “litriture” or simply fictionalized journalism I’ll leave for the hacks of academe to debate.
For these reasons, one can forgive Wolfe’s clumsy and senseless attempts at onomatopoeia (“rutrutrutrut”) and his strangely repetitive, cringe-inducing use of these three words: “plain-long” “loins” and “solar plexus.” And for all that’s left out of this novel (no discussion at all of, say, the battles between students and police, so pervasive on campuses these days), there are far too many details that are neither interesting in themselves nor relevant to the story, which, if excised, would’ve shaved about 100 pages off the thing.
The novel ends with an ambiguously depressing message: in spite of how brilliant Charlotte is, like other conventional intellectuals, she cannot live without the approval of others and she moreover becomes utterly dependent on having a Man in her life. Like the better moments of reality television, I am Charlotte Simmons imparts us with some of the understated and often unpleasant things about the human condition that we somehow already know but have the tendency to ignore.
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Mark Grueter is a writer living in New York City. He can be contacted at grueter@methree.net.
© 2004 Me Three