Wolfe to You: Doom.
(Published mid-2006ish, Duluth Reader Weekly. Slightly tweaked, mostly for grammar.)
It's a difficult ethical question whether to recommend I Am Charlotte Simmons (Tom Wolfe, Picador, 2004) to the presumptively innocent reader. I don't doubt for a moment that such an innocent reader (who may, in fact, be a pure invention of my own Wolfe-tormented mind, smashed to a state of blithering delusion on too many characters who are far too innocent of far too many virtues) will suffer wretched convulsions of agony as they abuse their eyes with this book. I did. And I can hardly be accused of innocence.
Were this brutal quality merely a matter of the absolute bloody-mindedness of the characters (and, by extension, their author), the solution would be easy. One would simply savage the book, visit the therapist, take the pills, and shudder down to the bar to wash out any lingering taste. On the other hand, if the discomfort comes from the combination of really good writing and the revelation of unpleasant maybe-truths about life and human nature, again, simple solution: praise the book to the skies with a gentle warning to the vulnerable.
The dilemma arises when both conditions are met in the same book. The misbehaviors of the author and his characters unquestionably necessitate the therapist, the pills, and the bar. But the savaging -- tempting (oh, God, so tempting!) as it may be - is a smidge unfair. The book does have a (rather obvious) point and a couple of reviewers, at least, seem to have caught it, including (distressingly), John Derbyshire in the National Review. And Wolfe, for all his terrible attitude and repulsive white suits, seems to have learned how to write somewhere, though surely not in college.
His point is this: You are Doomed.
Yes, doomed. Each character is ineluctably situated by the various imperatives of his or her race, class, religion, sex, and neurobiology. One almost feels sorry for them, but such an altruistic whim is doomed from the start too. The major characters are all so overwhelmingly vile that it's impossible to have a whit of compassion for any of them. And none of the minor characters are any better either.
Starting from the least intolerable and moving down, we have Adam. Adam, being the virgin super-nerd, is the only character that any male who choked down this 738-page book will have any hope of identifying with. Alas for Adam, he is also a toweringly arrogant manipulator who gets his jollies from (doomed) chess-like maneuvers to avoid the consequences of his academic misconduct while casually destroying (doomed) lives in the campus newspaper. He also really, really, wants to boink Charlotte. (His Charlotte-boinking-desire will be the source of much readerly screaming, I promise.)
Burrowing down a bit, we reach JoJo the Basketball Player. The only white starter, he is tragically burdened by a secret ambition to... you know... actually study a bit while he's in college. This ambition is repeatedly thwarted (doomed, even) including by at least one blow-job. As the book ends, things are looking up for him academically, but the attentive reader will experience this as having a half-life of roughly 20 more pages. He also really, really wants to boink Charlotte.
Down still further, we join Dante for a look at Hoyt. Is it even possible to have the slightest charitable impulse toward someone named Hoyt? Don't you just want to hit him already? You may take some comfort from the fact that any number of other characters hit him through the course of the book, but not nearly enough in this reviewer's opinion. He's the cutest, coolest boy in the zenith of the frats, son of a conman who follows in his father's footsteps. He really, really, wants an investment banking job. (Doomed, but you knew that.) And to boink Charlotte.
Gazing too long into the abyss, we finally meet Charlotte herself coming out the other end. (Charlotte's adventures with "the other end" are doubtless slated for the sequel.) Charlotte is a hick from some gawdawful place in West Virginia whose high school English teacher has convinced her that anyone who doesn't like her is a "tarantula," bent on bringing her down. When the ubiquitous tarantulas dent her self-glorifying armor, she takes a shot of ego-heroin: she simply recites "I am Charlotte Simmons" to herself like a mantra. Thus reassured that she exists on a plane of divinity far above the offal who surround her, Charlotte moves on with her merry old self.
Charlotte wants...well, she wants a lot of stuff. She wants a "life of the mind," but really not very much. She wants to be popular -- oh, how badly she wants to be popular! She wants to bring a man to cataclysmic tsunamis of lust and then rein him in "like a dog." (When that line enters the scene, the somehow-still-optimistic reader will immediately make like a mambo, bathing the book in hydrochloric acid as voodoo magic in the hope that somewhere, in some parallel n-dimensional universe, the real Charlotte Simmons is justly burning alive.) One can't help but suspect that what she really, really, wants is to boink Charlotte.
Let me smash one of the reader's last desperate hopes right here: not one of those wretched souls gets mercy-killed anywhere in the book. Perhaps a letter-writing campaign might move Wolfe to change this in the next printing?
The non-Charlotte characters end up ok in the end (at least, as ok as can be expected of hyper-doomed cliches). As for Charlotte, well, it goes like this: Innocent, smart prude/studious, Christian hick-girl goes to super-elitist college (Wolfe picked up a degree at Yale, and oh how it shows.). She decides all her college chums are "rutrutrutrutrutruting" scum, takes a neuroscience class, impresses the professor, etc.
In accordance with the doom theme, her downfall follows as noon follows night. Step one: get lured into a life of drinking "vodka, with orange juice." Yes, Wolfe has actually written a character so improbably innocent that she doesn't even know what a screwdriver is. One suspects he did so just to make the corruption process all the nastier.
Step two: wild monkey sex with an infuriatingly predictable subset of the other characters who want to boink her.
Step three: slough off all those nasty classes.
Step four: reduce herself to lifeless arm candy for one of the men, who have spent the entire novel collectively amusing themselves with the usual male follies: basketball, blackmail, plagiarism, fellatio, newspaper publishing, politics, etc. All of this is to sublimate their lust for Charlotte, natch.
So, back to the doom thing. Tom Wolfe's fascination with modern neuroscience is well-known. In his last book, Hooking Up, he connected the question of identity, free will, and the "death of the soul" to the death of God, proving himself up as a Nietzsche weirdo to boot. He ham-fistedly emphasizes this obsession in Charlotte Simmons, first by focusing the main character's stunted academic ambitions on a neuroscience class and then by introducing another young superstar to replace Charlotte as the apple of this professor's eye after Charlotte's disastrous downfall. The message, of course, being that this is an inevitable cycle, that the new Girl Genius will follow Charlotte into perdition just as Charlotte followed those sorority sluts for whom she had so much contempt in the beginning. (Back to the Nietzsche, I'm afraid. He credits the tarantula thing to Nietzsche too. Rule #1: Anyone who worships Nietzsche is deranged.)
In short, Charlotte's life is hopelessly conditioned by her sex, sexuality, and upbringing. Although she wants to follow her mind, she ends up following her hormones (and her gigantic ego) as far as they take her. Thus, just as she "chooses" the life of the popular arm-kitten over the "life of the mind," she "chooses" between the various suitors for her inevitable boinking. While she spends the entire book fanatically wanting to be interested in the smart guy, she gravitates to the cute losers like a Republican to oil money. Hoyt (the closest thing to a male lead in this play, since he's the second-most reprehensible character after Charlotte herself) also follows this theme. The consequences of his lust shatter the benefits of his blackmail and reveal the class-based inevitability of his ultimate failure.
All the rest are doomed by their position in the universe too. Even JoJo's triumph has the taste of transience about it, and all his behavior stems from his whiteness on the basketball team. As for Adam, every single act he undertakes in the entire damn book is rooted in either class resentment or lust for She Is Guess-Who.
The trick is that this brutally predictable plot (which includes every single excruciating step of Charlotte's melodramatic downfall) gains an aura of art, rather than just hackery. After all, it's supposed to be predictable! The reader is expected to come out of the experience endorsing Wolfe's dubious version of fatalism and the notion that one is doomed to the life assigned by one's demographic qualities. Any kind of marginally surprising behavior from any of the characters would be inconsistent with that. This is the literary equivalent of Bauhaus architecture, where the reader is thumped about the face with a sledgehammer and told it's good for him.
Despite these many sins, the book is at least terribly well written. One gets the feeling that Wolfe is just rubbing it in with this. In fact, the whole book has an air of superiority about it. (Between that and the white suit... and all this from a person who claims that his "support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions." Perhaps that's a Yale thing too.) It's impossible to get through this gloriously-composed torture without getting the sense that Tom Wolfe envisions himself on a Charlotte-like higher plane as the only person in the world who knows that the rest of us are doomed. Perhaps the book ought to be called "I Am Tom Wolfe." How did Hunter S. Thompson ever put up with this guy?
Word, incidentally, is that Bush loved this book. How much did the taxpayers pay Haliburton to read it to him?
So the question remains whether you will subject yourself to this monstrosity of a book. In the final analysis, you're completely at the will of your dopamine anyway, or so Tom Wolfe would have you believe. Sucker. Well, since life is meaningless, the soul is dead, you're surrounded by tarantulas, and your life is sliced and looped into an endless series of unsatisfying, booze-soaked, identically banal sexual encounters, I suppose you might as well. So, go ahead. Read it. See if I care.
But bring help. I suggest vodka.
With orange juice.
- Paul Gowder thinks snide commentary in bios is so 1976.
