Since I entered grad school many years ago, I have been drawn to academic novels. I think the first one I read was Jane Smiley’s Moo, which absolutely killed me because the big state university with its huge agriculture department sounded a lot like the place where I got my MA, except my school was in California. Then I moved on to Russo, Lodge, Kingsley Amis, Amanda Cross, Joanne Dobson, and several others. Recently I picked up Tom Wolfe’s latest Big Thing, I Am Charlotte Simmons. This novel is certainly entertaining, but it is also quite strange, and I have to say that the ending infuriated me.
Charlotte is from Sparta, North Carolina, the smartest thing ever to walk across the stage and receive a diploma from the little high school. She has been awarded a full scholarship to Dupont University in Chester, Pennsylvania, one of the top universities in the world. Dupont, though fictional, is pretty clearly modelled on Duke, complete with its national championship basketball team.
Not surprisingly, much of the story follows the good ol’ fish out of water format, with Charlotte, an aloof genius hyper-conscious of her own superiority, realizing just how different her ideas of college are from the reality. I found this part quite enjoyable, since, I, too, came from a small town, from a family not all that aware of the details of collegiate life, only to find myself dumped unceremoniously into the eternal hurricane that is U.C. Berkeley. Charlotte often wonders why these students don’t really seem to be all that interested in the life of the mind, given that they are the elite of the elite, and I smiled as I remembered my own parallel thoughts over twenty years ago.
Charlotte is not just brilliant but is also gorgeous, although Wolfe does not do all that much to describe her. She finds herself fending off the advances of three different upperclassmen, meant, no doubt, to represent three different types of college students. One is the enormously tall Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on the basketball team, whose performance on the court is threatened by his lack of performance in the classroom. Then there is Hoyt Thorpe, an amoral and ultimately sociopathic frat boy with a handsomely cleft chin and devastatingly seductive smile. Rounding out the types is Adam Gellin, a brilliant nerd with ambitions to become the new century’s equivalent of Bill Clinton, with a Rhodes Scholarship clearly in his sights. Each courts Charlotte in one way or another, and their respective charms and flaws make it difficult for her to figure out whose advances are the most desirable.
Wolfe is adept at the telling sociological scene, and this is both a strength and weakness of the novel. At times, the scenes feel as if they exist solely for Wolfe to advance some theory about race relations in sports or the politics of the professoriate. This becomes a problem when the characters themselves start mouthing Wolfe’s theories, making them seem less like people and more like actors in a brainy infomercial.
John Updike is the (in my mind) undisputed master of the brilliantly incisive and precisely worded observation, though Wolfe does a decent job at the same thing. I did notice, though an interesting obsession. Wolfe is apparently fascinated by the body culture that permeates college campuses, and he is especially interested in the Men’s Health-style body building culture where all men must have sharply defined abdominals and ripped arms. His catalog of the male characters’ muscles is anatomically explicit:
The trapezius muscles running from their necks to their shoulders bulged like cantaloupes. They were sweating, these bodybuilt young men, and the mighty LumeNex lights brought out their traps, lats, delts, pecs, abs, and obliques in glossy high definition, especially when it came to the black players.
Nearly every time Wolfe introduces a male character, he provides an almost identical list, sometimes expanding it in lubricious, homoerotic detail.
But the ending. Much of the novel follows Charlotte as she tries to make the transition from brainy high schooler to brainy college students, and, predictably, her first semester ends with abysmal grades and academic probation. She must face her problems and decide just what she wants to be, what she wants to do with her life at Dupont. In the final chapter, we see her sitting in the basketball arena, cheering on Jojo, her new boyfriend. Jojo had been about to lose his starting position on the team to an upstart freshman, but, we are told in this last chapter, Charlotte has somehow supercharged him and his game, and he is back to being a star, shining more brightly than ever. She cheers, she basks in the reflected glory of Jojo’s dominance, she preens when she knows that the popular sorority girls are watching her every move. I was left thinking, “This is what happens to her goals? To become the little woman behind the big man?” It was truly a maddening and inconsistent way to end the novel. Wolfe, it seems, just cannot get past his outmoded, misogynistic views to create a character who better represents college women. Charlotte, far from being a refreshingly different and strong character, ultimately falls into the trap of shallow conformity and stereotypical gender roles.
The Hobgoblin of Little Minds 