I Am Charlotte Simmons: We Know, We Know!
Review by Breanne Boland December 30, 2004 Issue

I've been meaning to read something by Tom Wolfe for a long time. I've heard about Tom Wolfe for years in writing classes: about him pioneering New Journalism, and about his various works, and the legacy he's created through his long, varied career. At first this seemed like it'd be a nice melodrama: boys and girls and sex and pressure of all kinds, all things that usually make for an engaging read, made more substantial by the author.

Wolfe earned his reputation with nonfiction, and despite working in fiction here, his research seems to be no less diligent. There are two full pages of thanks for people who helped him shape and refine this book. However, after making it through all 676 pages of it, I wonder if every person and group listed on those pages was putting him on, because this bears no resemblance to any college existence I've ever witnessed, read about, heard about, or experienced.

Charlotte Simmons is a college freshman from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. She's lived a very sheltered life, shunning the drunken exploits of her high school classmates for "a life of the mind," as she thinks of it. She earns a full scholarship to prestigious and fictional Dupont University, which is repeatedly compared to Harvard and Yale, and she looks forward to the beginning of a life of higher learning. Unfortunately, the Dupont she finds is less revered academic institution and more den of depravity: her dorm is coed, and people drink, and what's more, they have sex! Charlotte finds herself in a tizzy of moral superiority and social isolation.

We're told over and over throughout the story that Charlotte is a genius. Her high school mentor says that Charlotte is the one student who made her whole career worthwhile. She's won awards, gone to an event at the White House, been piled with academic accolades, but when foisted onto the world, she goes beyond innocence to behaving like she's actually quite stupid. While she may not have had a lot of life experience, it's well established that she's a voracious reader. Even if her book list was restricted only to the classics... people have sex in those too. Charlotte behaves not like someone who has almost never left North Carolina, but like someone who has never left her house, or perhaps her prayer closet. We're told that Charlotte has never even read a copy of Cosmopolitan. She's presented to us as a pretty normal girl underneath all of her backwardness: she likes boys, she wants to look nice, and all that. There is no way that Charlotte, with all of her supposed intellectual curiosity, would never have read this or some similar magazine. At times like this, her naivetÈ rushes past being occasionally annoying into being completely unbelievable.

It seems like Charlotte's arc in this book would be one of an opening mind: she comes to college intelligent but not worldly, and is positioned as a sheep being pushed into a school full of wolves. However, nothing ever seems to change. Things happen to her, she reacts, but she stays the same. She comes to no greater understanding of her situation, or where she wants to be. She's just there, still saying to herself, I Am Charlotte Simmons, her constant and very annoying affirmation. I Am Charlotte Simmons. Ah. My condolences.

There's a cast of supporting characters, and thank God that we step into their points of view sometimes, else this wouldn't be a complete book review. Unfortunately, not a single character ever rises above his or her designated stereotype. Wolfe tries to avert this by giving some characters interesting and well thought out back-stories, but after their initial presentation, they are rarely brought up again, or even acknowledged in the character. Because of that, it doesn't matter what one person's father did, or the family history of another, regardless of how interesting and vivid those stories are. After those perfunctory attempts at making the characters three-dimensional, we're still left with a brain... and an athlete... and a princess... and John Hughes is calling, and would like his archetypes back.

Dupont's entire social system appears to be high school intensified. Usually, these hierarchies disappear when people go to college, but instead its students are mired in a snobby, judgmental dystopia of frat boys, sorority girls, jocks, and a nerdy underclass. The problem is not that its students drink and have sex; it's that they're rarely shown doing anything else. Even life-of-the-mind Charlotte is only shown going to class three or four times, and other characters almost not at all. Except for an academic dishonestly subplot, actual education barely makes an appearance in the story. Apparently the school's prestige is earned solely by a dedicated and invisible group of students diligently working in a hidden place far away from the storyteller's eye. We never even learn what departments the school is best known for. All we know is that it's really, really good. Like Harvard good. Seriously.

A few parts of the book reveal the Tom Wolfe I'd hoped to find. His exploration of the pressure and corruption of high-stakes college sports is insightful and informative. Digressions on obscene patois were funny, particularly when he made a long list of the various ways the f-word is used—adjective, noun, verb, etc. However, those bright spots are only ever just that—digressions, a brief rest from the banality of the rest of the book.

A passage from this book won a British award for the worst sex scene in this year's published works. The scene that won him the prize is far from erotic, but it's not meant to be, and so I think the award is undeserved. However, it's certainly worth nominating for other worst lists: Worst depiction of teenage girl depression, for an entire chapter that repeats, over and over, that a depressed girl does this and that and the other thing, with great and unearned authority; Worst depiction of female characters, as each woman in the book is either a virgin or completely and irretrievably debauched; and, most unfortunate of all, Worst use of a lot of time and effort. Alas, after all of the research and writing, Tom Wolfe has produced a book that belongs in the Young Adult section, and not in a prominent place. Having a cast of young characters does not necessarily qualify a work for that particular literary ghetto, but doing nothing to transcend the genre that this type of story belongs in most definitely does.

This book is available at local book retailers and libraries.

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