‘I Am Charlotte Simmons’ by Tom Wolfe
It was about a year ago that I read, and absolutely loved, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s seminal satirical novel of 1987. In light of my enthusiastic response to the novel I thought it high time to bring out another of Wolfe’s works, and I Am Charlotte Simmons has been lying on my bookshelf, unloved, for quite some time now. First published in 2004, some seventeen years after the aforementioned work, I Am Charlotte Simmons weighs in at an unwieldy 676 pages and tells the story of a naïve young woman - a young woman named Charlotte Simmons, natch - who arrives at an ultra-prestigious university only to find herself isolated from her fellow freshman students, thrown headfirst into a weird new world of bed-hopping and keg-tapping. Hmm…
Born and brought up in the aptly named community of Sparta, North Carolina, valedictorian Charlotte Simmons arrives at Dupont University (a fictional mash-up of Duke University architecture and University of Pennsylvania geography) on a full academic scholarship. On arriving at Dupont she is confronted with Beverly, the archetypal roommate from hell, a girl who is never without her beloved cell phone or a lacrosse player to fool around with. Charlotte must also negotiate the dorm’s dreaded coed bathrooms, a character-building task to say the least, along with the sense of isolation that comes with being a humble country girl in a sea of preened and pampered trust fund babies. And then, of course, there is Dupont University’s proudest and yet most bothersome asset - its star athletes.
By way of a subplot that is equal parts High School Musical and One Tree Hill, albeit without the added annoyance of Chad Michael Murray, we learn that Dupont University is all but ruled by its basketball stars. One of these stars, Jojo Johanssen, a six-seven slab of a boy and one of the only white players on the Dupont team, crosses paths with Charlotte early on, during a class discussion of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. We gather that Jojo is rather taken with Charlotte - the slim and unassumingly attractive girl from the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains - but Charlotte, ever the scholar, deflects his advances and transfers to a more challenging French class. Ouch.
Another Dupont male who falls under Charlotte Simmons’ low-key country girl spell is one Adam Gellin, the very antithesis of Jojo Johanssen. Far from being a six-seven basketball pro of Swedish extraction, Adam is smart, sensitive and slightly built, but that doesn’t stop him heading up the Millennial Mutants, a band of righteous crusaders who just so happen to run Dupont’s independent newspaper, The Wave. In fact, the only thing that Jojo and Adam have in common (aside from their fondness for Charlotte, of course) is their disdain for one another, most likely fostered by their tutor-tutee relationship. No prizes for guessing who’s who. When Jojo enlists Adam to write a history paper for him, mere hours before the deadline, a sequence of events begins in which Charlotte becomes not just instrumental but crucial.
There is also a frat boy asshole named Hoyt Thorpe who is, if you like, the Sherman McCoy of I Am Charlotte Simmons. Feel free to check out my write-up of The Bonfire of the Vanities if you have no idea what I’m talking about. Hoyt Thorpe is a big name on campus, the most prominent member of the most prominent fraternity, and he uses this notoriety to his own advantage, all but assaulting new students (including Charlotte, of course) with Britney Spears-related pick-up lines. Eurgh. However, much like Sherman McCoy before him, Hoyt Thorpe gets his comeuppance in the end, though to say how and why would be to spoil one of the novel’s more intriguing subplots.
So, now that I’ve exhausted most of the novel’s many subplots, allow me to state my own personal opinion of I Am Charlotte Simmons. For me, the book started somewhat shakily (the depiction of Sparta, NC and its residents became a tad tiresome at times), became intensely readable somewhere before the half-way mark, and then lost it again towards the home stretch, eventually ending on an ambiguous and ultimately unsatisfying note, particularly as far as Charlotte Simmons herself is concerned. While Tom Wolfe employs a structure similar to that used in The Bonfire of the Vanities, that of multiple stories told alongside one another in a distinctly Dickensian manner, this larger-than-life storytelling does not necessarily sit well with the novel’s collegiate setting and coming-of-age subject matter.
Overall, I feel that I Am Charlotte Simmons would be a much more convincing read if at least a third of it were cut, for the truly wonderful sequences are almost smothered by those which are more execrable.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in December 2012.