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I Am Charlotte Simmons
Reviewed by Julia Colyar
Tom Wolfe. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2004.
Since the publication of Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons in November, a slew of reviewers have offered celebrations and condemnations. While many laud the complicated narrative of the title character's first year in college, others decry the plot, characters, and message as empty, juvenile, and inauthentic. More than in this dispute, however, I am interested in the ways readers respond to Wolfe's portrayal of campus life. How do we answer the question, Is this what college is like?
Like Wolfe's earlier novels, Charlotte Simmons is excessive; the book weighs in at nearly seven hundred pages and contains much of the journalistic detail for which Wolfe is well known. He spends several sentences, for example, describing the cut of a pair of "fashionably exhausted" Diesel-brand jeans. With perhaps too much specificity, Wolfe draws a portrait of coed bathrooms; in another scene, he follows a basketball game from the hardwood floor itself, noting every sneaker screech and bounce pass. The hacking, hard-fought game is as much felt as read.
Despite Wolfe's adept prose, however, a reader might never feel comfortable on the Dupont University campus. Many reviewers point out Wolfe's age (seventy-three at the writing of the novellikely older than the parents of most current college students) as a means of explaining the discomfort. Undoubtedly, his college experiences were much different from those he recounts. Even Wolfe's image looking out from the back cover draws attention to his misplacement: his white suit, elegant handkerchief, and polka-dotted tie are a far cry from the baggy khakis and tank-tops his characters wear. If Charlotte Simmons, the ingenue from the backwoods of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is an alien at Dupont, Wolfe is as well. Both are outsiders, often pretending to understand. But Wolfe and his title character are not alone in their outsiderness; most of his other characters have take their own turns at "pretending to understand." The academic reader also stands on the sidelines, often feeling like a witness to a car accident, or perhaps like the stereotypical athlete in a philosophy classat once involved in the setting and experience, but also blissfully outside. Tales of tenure and departmental politics resonate to academics; it is much more difficult to connect with stories of residence hall debauchery.
As he does in much of his writing, Wolfe captures places and people using local language. And again, his effort highlights outsiderness. Though his narrator adopts the speech patterns and idiosyncrasies of college talk "ohmygod," "totally," and "Frère Jocko"—he also interrupts the story to translate. Frère Jocko, the reader learns, is the term students use to describe a French class "easy" enough for athletes. At various points in the novel, Wolfe takes even more time to provide the patois of profanity. How many different ways can a student conjugate the profane? According to Wolfe's narrator, thirty-one: verbs, nouns, exclamations, expressions of contempt or even awe, criticisms of ignorance, and so on. Even as Wolfe brings the readers into the rhythm of student lives, his frequent interruptions suggest that we need a guide.
Unfortunately, Wolfe's descriptions and translations fall flat, leading to characters that appear as simple stereotypes. This is not what college is like, we might argue; Wolfe's story is all surface, and his characters only caricature. His description of a fraternity party—strobe lights, beer kegs, and young women wearing little clothing—is more striking for what it does not reveal than for what it does. Wolfe's unsurprising frat party looks like something out of Animal House. It is easy to assimilate Wolfe's characters and situations into what one already "knows" about college and college students. Athletes get preferential treatment, young women battle eating disorders and spend all their time thinking about "hook ups" and fashion, and young men are always asserting their real or imagined sexual prowess. Jocks, the reader knows before cracking the spine of the novel, do not take philosophy; they take "Rocks for Jocks" (geology) and "Vox for Jocks" (communication). In this way, Wolfe does not give the reader any particularly new imagery to puzzle over. Rather, he gives us stereotypes in faded jeans, contemporary students playing the age old parts of "college kids."
We might puzzle over the fact that these cartoonish characters and situations are all that Wolfe offers. But perhaps it would be more fruitful to puzzle over the fact that such stereotypes are all that we can read. If we view I Am Charlotte Simmons with a questioning eye, we might wonder about those types and why they are so easy to identify. We might hope that Wolfe has got it wrong—maybe student athletes do not have tutors that complete all their homework?—but we are likely convinced of their reality before we even get past page two. Despite what we know about college life, these images and assumptions still seduce even those of us who spend time with college students every day. What Wolfe ultimately provides, then, is confusing—detailed, dramatic portraits of students that we simultaneously recognize and disdain.
The strength of Wolfe's novel lies not in the minutiae he uses to construct the college setting. These only recreate the types we are all too familiar with. Instead, its strength is in the ways Wolfe confuses us, the ways he makes us look and turn away, recognize and dismiss, and the ways he makes us uncomfortable. Beyond the obvious plot, which we might easily reject, Wolfe captures the confusions of college life, those that occupy students, and those that confound onlookers: parents, faculty, administrators, and, in this case, readers. He captures, even embodies, the ways in which college can make all students feel like outsiders.
Can this be what college is like? readers might ask—as might Charlotte Simmons herself. And despite the novel's tendency toward caricature, the answer is a resounding yes. Our own research tells us as much, though in less graphic imagery and without the profanity. Though Wolfe's Dupont University is not every college, nor is it an apt description of everything college is or can be, it is one readers know, possibly attended, and might even teach at right now. In addition to caricature, Wolfe has captured our own uncertainty about student experiences and the misuse of college opportunities. And he presents us with an opportunity to examine the questions that are often overshadowed by the force of stereotype, by the things we think we already know: why don't jocks take philosophy? And what, really, is college all about?
Julia Colyar is assistant professor of educational administration and higher education at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
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