04.04.05 - 1:41 p.m.

Reviewish: I am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe

I'd intended to process my reactions to I am Charlotte Simmons much sooner than this, but it's hard for me to marshall my thoughts and find some coherent way of expressing them. The novel traffics in some of the worst, most stupid stereotypes out there, but within the confines of those stereotypes, Wolfe does most of his stereotypes justice. I was thrilled with much of the first, say, four hundred pages. The prose was readable and breezy, if a little repetitive: the overobsession with made-up hiphop lines, the litany of bulging male muscles, like a Nicene creed for the body-obsessed.

("We believe in the pecs, the lats, the delts..." - puke. And although I suppose one must concede that that was supposed to be fictionalized reportage and not the author's own obsession, well, bleh: it was the author's own obsession, I think, whether with the idea of the Greek - and I mean those dead guys, not the half-dead guys who through keggers every weekend - ideal, or just ordinary homoerotic interest, I don't know.)

More than that, though, I felt such a shock of recognition (shock - chill? making a shocking chill, something like that, something cold and sick, yeah, but a little less clich�d: a stone in the stomach, cold and wet and sinking. Bleh. That's not it, either. I came up with the perfect analogy earlier, but I didn't write it down and I lost it. Now everything I write is this strange shadowtwin of the real analogy, a poorly made, apprentice's copy masquerading as a masterpiece.) - whatever, it was fucking raw, really. It felt like Tom Wolfe - effete old Tom Wolfe, with his crazy white suits and his lengthy "research" into "what campus life is really like in these sexxay times" - sank a taproot right into the dark half of my brain. The immediate culture shock Charlotte experienced, the tension between her expectations and the reality of campus life, the horrible, self-obsessed, self-aware loathing, and the weird behavior and self-talk that flowed from the confluence of the three: I could have written that. Those early passages about Charlotte's first days at "DuPont" seemed like they were lifted from some future, painfully honest autobiography, and I could not stop reading.

Except, Charlotte and I were different, because Charlotte was preternaturally gorgeous and preternaturally brilliant, with her goofy backwoods classicism and her virginal good looks and her brilliant naivete that captured the heart (or at least, the predatory sexual interest) of two BMOC and one LMOC, and I hated her. At first, I forgave the book for Charlotte's idiocies. Not the idiocies of youth, those were brilliantly managed, especially in the first half of the book, and not just for Charlotte, but for most of the (stereotypical) characters; rather, the idiocies of "innocence" and "purity." Maybe Wolfe didn't realize how broadly he painted Charlotte, maybe he didn't know - guh, how fucking dishonest it made his whole reportage. Maybe he couldn't handle the subtleties necessary to pull off someone who is both naive, but also sexually aware, who is a sexual creature, but still remote enough from the hook-up culture to be seriously wounded by being used in the ways, well, kids use each other. Sad. It could've been a really worthwhile book - or, not worthwhile, but less hysterical, less Victorian, and a little more authentic.

Sometimes, you can read the author into a character: maybe not the author exactly, but some aspect of the author, wish fulfillment (the way-too-awesomely quirky dead chick in Dogs of Babel, for example, seems like absolute author-wish-fulfillment fluff, for example), and in this novel, Charlotte seems like a stand-in for Wolfe, but Wolfe is no innocent, and Charlotte would improve so much if she were: less on-the-spot brilliant (ridiculously), and significantly less naive. Conflicted about sex, et al, is okay. Stupid is not. She wasn't raised under a rock. Also: duh, Tom Wolfe. The stand-of-housing in Appalachia is obviously the trailer or, for the high-class people, the double-wide, which anyone can get if they own a patch of ground, or the 100-year-old family home, and not a basement-become-hut. You could get away with that homeplace fifty years ago, but not today, so much, anymore.

In the end, I hated all the characters, including Charlotte. That's okay: they're hateable, and sometimes it's something of a feat to write sympathetically about hateable characters. I was able to empathize with most of the characters as they faced their various crises, but I still hated them all, except (of all things), Jojo Johansson, the basketball star. He should have been hateable, but he wasn't. (And, now that I think about it, maybe he was Wolfe's other "outsider" to the system, another occasional authorial stand-in, and I'll also speculate that Hoyt Thorpe is another authorial - dude, or maybe not authorial, maybe a stand-in for the reader - standin, another quasi-outsider, hoping (planning) to break in. If so, the ending is so crazy-appropriate, everyone fucking each other, so perfectly self-obsessed. Ahh, gorgeous.

Verdict: if you have an erotic fixation on the male form, have a thing for virgins, or are a little too nostalgic for your college days and have 700 pages of your life available to spend, read it. If you're old, you can then walk around and moan about "college kids today" and "what's the world coming to?" or "I'm worried about the future of our country." Or, hell, you can do that when you're twenty-four, if you like. In fact, I'll bet you that - at this very moment - there's a twenty-year-old somewhere bemoaning what "kids these days" get away with that her or she never was allowed to do.