Book Review
Tom Wolfe goes back to college

By Melinda Bargreen
Special to The Seattle Times

JIM COOPER / AP The prose is even more breathless in Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons" than in his "The Bonfire of the Vanities."

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Worst of all, at Dupont University (a fictitious Pennsylvania Ivy League campus said to be modeled on Stanford), athletics and fraternity aristocrats trump academics so thoroughly that no one even pretends the professors are nearly as important as the basketball program or the leading frat house.

And the basketball program, whose players don't know who Socrates was, is kept afloat by rampant cheating and by a succession of dumbed-down courses for jocks — nicknamed Frere Jocko (French for jocks), Jock Sprache (German), Rocks for Jocks (geology) and Vox for Jox (communications).

By now, you can tell that Wolfe is on a real roll here, with the same skewering wit honed by such previous work as "The Bonfire of the Vanities," and a prose style that has grown even more breathless with the passage of time: "She was wearing ordinary sweatpants, not low-cut, but they fit tight on her buttocks — and that line! That line! A dark line of sweat had formed in the crevice between the two buttocks. It clove the declivity and reached down under into the very mystery of her loamy loins. He couldn't keep his eyes off it — the dark, wet, rivulet that led to ... Oh, loamy, loamy loins!"

"I Am Charlotte Simmons" by Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 676 pp., $28.95

Yes, you have to get past a fairly loamy prose style. But what Wolfe has come up with in this book (in bookstores today) is a terrific (if frequently depressing) coming-of-age story, with a protagonist unlike any of his previous characters. Meet Charlotte Simmons, a brilliant 18-year-old from an impoverished and repressive home in rural North Carolina. Charlotte's about to bust out of the neighborhood with admissions to five of the country's best universities, and she is ready to make the most of her full-scholarship years at Dupont: "A radiant dawn had arisen," she tells herself as she surveys the campus' Great Yard.

"I Am Charlotte Simmons" is Charlotte's spiritual rallying cry, the reassertion of her own intellectual uniqueness and her desire to live a "life of the mind" at last, freed from the limitations of her poor, back-country background. It's the statement of a proud young scholar capable of earning A-pluses in all four of her university subjects at midterm time. But gradually she loses track of who Charlotte really is, sinking into a miasma of loneliness, enduring the contempt of her wealthy anorexic roommate and all the other campus bastions of utter coolness. Academic success, she comes to understand, is not the be-all and end-all — not on this campus that fairly whirs and buzzes in a maelstrom of sex and vodka and rampant consumerism.

Wolfe takes a lot of risks with his protagonist. He constantly mocks her accent by writing the dialogue first, then his phonetic interpretation of how Charlotte's country twang really sounds ("where" becomes "whirr," for example). After awhile, these little linguistic asides begin to pall, and you wish Wolfe would just leave her alone, instead of giving us sentence after sentence of: " 'I did,' — dee-ud — said Charlotte, forcing a smile." The author also gives us a heroine who is almost comically out of touch with contemporary society; surely no 18-year-old girl in her circumstances would really be so ignorant of fashion that she doesn't know her high-waisted jeans (along with the rest of her wardrobe) were out of style.

But Wolfe certainly knows his college stuff. He spent several weeks in residence at four different universities, soaking up atmosphere and dialogue and details of "this conspicuous lapidary consumption of all this royal Middle English Gothic architecture." (It might be that his novelist's eye for exaggeration, and his 73-year-old sensibilities, combine to overstate the sex-and-drinking ambience a little).

Along with recounting Charlotte's rise and fall (of course she succumbs to alcohol, to sex, to a catastrophic grade-dooming depression, and finally to the status of a basketball-star boyfriend), Wolfe gives us some brilliant vignettes. He charts the posturings of the nerds who all want to be Rhodies (Rhodes Scholars); the cultural wars between blacks and whites in athletics; the frantic jockeying for a spot on the basketball starting lineup; the evil treatment of the uncool students by the cool ones; the power plays between athletes ("alien mercenaries paid in kind and in glory") and coaches, who don't want their players to get too invested in actual school.

In the end, Charlotte still doesn't know the real meaning of her declaration, "I Am Charlotte Simmons" — but the novel is a wild ride, one that will entertain, appall and illuminate readers along the way.

Melinda Bargreen is the Seattle Times classical music reviewer.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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