Monthly Archives: August 2006

From time to time I write formal book reviews on works I particularly like. Previous formal book reviews have been on affirmative action, national security, the CIA and Afghanistan, atheism, and the prodigious mind of David Foster Wallace. This review is on I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe, an entertaining and thoroughly researched take on a bright, rural, innocent college freshman adapting to campus life. Thanks to Jesse Berrett for reading a draft of this.

It is painful to read about a bright young mind destroyed by violence, insane parents, or any other of society’s corruptive influences. We try hard to identify gifted youth and steer them toward pure brands of life which can incite their intellect to invent and change and publish without distraction. We have magnate schools, MacArthur Fellowships, centers for gifted children. Anything that staves off vices which make the gifted regress to simply average out of pure self-consciousness. Many would place America’s top-notch universities in the same boat: beautiful, ensconced campuses attracting the brightest minds from all over the world, devoted to the joint pursuit of ideas. This vision, Tom Wolfe shows in his newest novel, is grossly inaccurate.

His protagonist Charlotte Simmons is a brilliant high school student. She wins all the academic awards, delivers the valedictorian address, and is repeatedly told that she will shape the future we all live in. Moreover, she’s drop dead gorgeous. Charlotte, though, is not an east-coast boarding school student. Her lower-class family hails from a small town in North Carolina where the Southern accent rides high and cursing / drinking / sex are absent from an adolescent’s reality. Money is tight, clothes and make-up sparse. Charlotte is, in short, the sole pride of this small mountain town, and so receives a full scholarship to attend among the most prestigious universities in the land: Dupont. Some say Wolfe modeled Dupont on Duke University, which is probably an accurate guess, as Charlotte also considered Yale and Harvard. Dupont attracts the smartest and richest students, which means mostly white, attractive, upper-class students who studied at elite private high schools. When Charlotte arrives at Dupont for real academic challenges and "the life of the mind" as she puts it, she instead finds a stuck-up roommate, co-ed bathrooms, and endless alcohol and casual sex. The culture shock is overwhelming for Charlotte. Not just the blatant displays of wealth and SAT-tutored perfect white kids, but the anti-intellectual current that runs contrary to the brand name "Dupont". Sex, kegs, and jocks trump academic achievement at every turn.

Innocent Charlotte grapples with the competing tugs of mind and body: her quest for serious intellectual pursuit and her stated commitment not to drink or have sex, on the one hand, and her hormonal urge to do just that, on the other. This tension drives the narrative, as we see Charlotte creep, and creep, and creep. It starts with going to a frat party. Then a frat party where she sips a drink. Then a frat party where she sips a drink and dances with a basketball player who seeks out "fresh meat". Then a frat party where she sips a drink and dances with a guy and follows the guy to a room, only to then realize a room in a frat house with drunk college students means a room for sex. "I want some ass! I need some ass! Anybody know where’s some ass?" one man yells at the party. As she progresses up – or down? – the ladder, I’m torn. I don’t want her to become as dirtied as the alcoholic jocks or materialistic bitches (and "bitches" is truly the most accurate term for these designer outfit girls who live in her dorm), but I also don’t want her to sit in her dorm room all day in miserable isolation.

Continue reading “Formal Book Review: I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe”