College try
Tom Wolfe's overwrought attempt at skewering university life is nasty, brutish, and long
I Am Charlotte Simmons
By Tom Wolfe
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 676 pp., $28.95
It's a poor lookout being a principal character in a Tom Wolfe novel. The pay is good. You get power, privilege, or wealth, and usually all three; and you are most excellently delineated by a master caricaturist whose detail work is lavish yet exact.
But you come to a lousy end. Witness poor Sherman McCoy, the bond trader in ''The Bonfire of the Vanities," and Charles Croker, the high-flying, crash-landing real estate mogul in ''A Man in Full." Worse, your end is inexorably in sight right from the beginning. Under his dazzle, peacockery, and -- often -- sheer pleasurable dexterity, Wolfe is a Puritan to make Cotton Mather seem giggly.
In fact he suggests a harsher lineage: back to ''Struwwelpeter," the 19th-century German classic in which children who are naughty or reckless are consigned to garish incinerations and limb loppings. They were punished for failing to conform to a rigid society. Wolfe's punishment, on the contrary, is for conforming -- to a quite opposite society he sees as lax, valueless, and self-besotted.
Like an epidemiologist tracing contamination downstream, Wolfe has shifted his laboratory of elegant rot from the adult world into that of its children. ''I Am Charlotte Simmons" tries to do for the university what the previous novels did respectively for New York and the Sunbelt. It is shakier ground for a Wolfe blockbuster (676 pages); treading it, the author has to flail and stamp more wildly to keep his place. The proportion of rant overload to silky observation has much increased.
Dupont University, in Pennsylvania, is a brutish Darwinian jungle where the fittest rend each other for the local version of status. This has nothing to do with intellectual achievement. It goes to those who drink the most, belong to the wildest fraternities and sororities, and hook up with most abandon.
The priapic campus gods are the star basketball team. The rest of the university prostrates itself to the players in a variety of ways: financially (the fearsome coach makes five times what the president does), academically (there's a whole structure of jock courses taught by compliant professors), and sexually (swarms of groupies).
Like some Pauline of the Perils, Charlotte Simmons ventures from her home in Appalachia to enter Dupont on a scholarship. Unlike Pauline, she remains tied fast to the rails while an entire freight train of horrors runs over her. Timid and bright, she'd hoped to leave her small-town world for an eden of blossoming intellect and rarefied discourse. What she finds is an eden that is all snakes.
And she is no mongoose. ''I am Charlotte Simmons," she keeps repeating in a self-asserting mantra; but the author doesn't allow her a self. Like other Wolfe protagonists, she is simply a waxy candle he uses up to allow him to curse the darkness of society, in this case that of its universities. Her counterpart candle, another studious nerd, is Adam, who earns his way by writing papers for the sports stars.
Charlotte has no fight to offer, simply a low-spirited moan that goes on for hundreds of pages of snubbed and prat-felled illusions. Then she is shattered in a sadistic date-rape that takes place during an out-of-town orgy organized by the college's top fraternity. Wolfe polishes orgy and rape to high-detail finish. Also, he makes them endless. He slows his horror film, frame by frame, with each humiliating grunt and spill elaborated and lingered over.
The ravisher is Hoyt, star of the fraternity and the most evil of the book's main characters. Since weeks before, he had been engineering Charlotte -- ingeniously, tenderly, and of course coldly -- into a state of near-compliance. The bait was his melting good looks and, above all, his hottie status.
The rape precipitates what Dupont's twisted values had been instilling all along: Stockholm syndrome. Charlotte's frail intellectual principles were being eaten away by the spirit of the place. Now, unable to beat it, she doesn't just join it but becomes its starry queen: unlikely and envied consort to JoJo, the college basketball great. Dim, thick, but with a weak spark of decency, JoJo is smitten: partly for that exotic pretty thing, Charlotte's mind; partly for her look, so different from the flash and dangle of his groupie harem.
For her sake -- also because of vague doubts about whether basketball will always be all -- he makes a short-lived effort to work at his studies. By the end, though, the reader is left in little doubt whether Charlotte will pull JoJo up or he, by sheer gravity, will pull her down.
A number of Wolfe's strengths are on display. His one-to-one confrontations are masterly: JoJo and his coach; Hoyt and a Wall Street scout who bribes him with a job offer in exchange for silence over a harmful incident.
On the other hand, his interminable and usually scabrous set scenes -- the orgy is only one -- are too overworked and overloaded to take off. And this points to some fundamental problems.
When Wolfe detailed how bond traders and speculators work, he caricatured power, always worth doing. Here he is attempting to caricature college life with a ponderous if sharp-clawed intensity quite beyond its subject's weight. Also skewing it. Few of us, after all, trade bonds or run real estate empires; many of us, and our children, have been to college and know that Wolfe presents, at best, a dumbed-down part as a dumbed-down whole. And plausibility is strained further by making jock-ridden Dupont the equivalent of Harvard or Princeton.
Satire knocks the hat off; it doesn't decapitate. If it does, it doesn't prod the bodies for 700 pages. Wolfe as novelist has been called Dickensian for his massive engagement with his time. But Dickens put himself into his characters and got them to put themselves into us. Wolfe uses his and pushes them away.
In one way or other, literature deals with how we live (or avoid living) now. Wolfe's novels have the rough relation to serious fiction that ''The Drudge Report" has to serious journalism, knowing the price of everything and the value of not much.
Richard Eder writes about books for various publications. 