Junto Boys

I AM CHARLLOTE SIMMONS by Tom Wolfe (A Book Review)

To paraphrase Michael Barone, our society creates the most inept 18 year-olds and the most super competent 30 year-olds in the world. Tom Wolfe shows us in I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS how incompetent the 18 year olds of today are, in the setting of a prestigious University full of the best and brightest. His third novel should worry parents and enlighten the rest of us.

Those familiar with Wolfe’s style of new journalism will appreciate how he uses a combination of subtlety and action to reveal character traits and feelings. Wolfe’s characters are funny because they are mostly charlatans, egomaniacs or self-righteous bores. This novel and his last both introduce sympathetic characters and he puts them into a society that doesn’t understand their inherent goodness. Wolfe makes his heroes re-think their own values in a world that would just as soon stomp on them.

Charlotte has been given the immense gift of fleeing her poor rural life and living amongst contemporary geniuses. What she assumes will be discussion groups on philosophy and science is, in fact, a campus of frat parties and hooking up. She’s isolated and clings to her own small town values, but as her loneliness grows deeper, she compromises little things and later bigger things to better fit in. Wolfe gives us 700 pages to watch Charlotte’s strength get sapped by the unforgiving realities of contemporary life.

Along the way we meet jocks, geeks, frat boys, sorority girls, genius professors and radical hippy ones. We meet college coaches and rich parents and famous politicians and very few of them come off looking noble. Wolfe can be salacious when he describes the goings on and it’s a big plus for the book, because we can enjoy the description and later feel morally superior to the acts themselves. It’s not too unlike how Cecil B. DeMille created biblical epics to get away with all kinds of lasciviousness.

This is an unforgiving look at how modern colleges have adopted ancient Greek Bacchus like behavior, while ignoring the virtuous Socratic philosophy. Some writers may have used this material to endlessly moralize, but Wolfe seems more like one of those ancient Greek Gods laughing from Mount Olympus.