Tom's Life Bits

Published: Nov 14, 2004 Modified: Nov 14, 2004 3:00 AM

He is Tom Wolfe Literature's answer to the neon scene takes on modern college life in a novel whose true star is, of course, the author himself.

By MICHAEL GRIFFITH

Tom Wolfe is one of the most innovative and flamboyant journalists of the last century, known as much for his loud public image as for his crackling, hyperkinetic prose. That unmistakable style, a kind of erotic display, fits his brand of participatory journalism, where Wolfe is not so much a quiet observer of his subjects as he is their rival or conqueror. His best nonfiction has the feel of hand-to-hand combat, as Wolfe, the white-suited alpha male, takes on other alpha males, such as race car legend Junior Johnson in “The Last American Hero” and the Mercury astronauts in “The Right Stuff.” Wolfe's huge presence and the smell of testosterone also pervade his two previous novels – both “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full” take place largely in a sphere where machismo rules, high finance. But Wolfe's fiction has failed to rise to the level of his nonfiction. In general, novelists should be inconspicuous; they should take a back seat to their creations. This is a skill Wolfe has little aptitude or desire for, and his inability to get out of the way of his characters disfigures his third novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons.”

Set at a Pennsylvania school called Dupont that resembles Duke or Stanford, the book is a savage journey into the heart of the American university. We follow the fortunes of a simple country girl from Western North Carolina named Charlotte Simmons, who has landed not in the Life of the Mind she imagined but in a cesspool of sex, substance abuse, rampant profanity and corrupt, big-time athletics. Just as he smote the world of modern art in his nonfiction work “The Painted Word,” Wolfe unleashes here a 676-page jeremiad against a generation that has become a casualty of the casual: casual sex, casual obscenity, casual dress.

Wolfe does demonstrate the brilliant touch for social detail, especially status detail, that makes him a formidable journalist. His account of campus slang – a patois he gives an unprintable name – is inventive and mostly persuasive, as when he catalogs the several dozen commonest colloquial uses for two four-letter words. Wolfe's ear for young-adult idiom isn't flawless, but it's entertaining to learn terms like “sexile” (to send a roommate packing for erotic purposes) and “frostitute” (a portmanteau from “frosh” and “prostitute”). Meet the author

Tom Wolfe will appear at 7 p.m. Dec. 1 at the McKimmon Center on the campus of N.C. State University. Tickets are required and cost $5 for everyone except NCSU students, who can get in free. Tickets can be purchased at Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh, which is giving tickets to anyone who buys a copy of “I Am Charlotte Simmons” at the shop.

Wolfe is skilled not only in lexicography but also in social theory (he has great fun applying labels: “Millennial Mutants,” “Shrunken Mommy Complex,” et cetera). He excels at broad-stroke summary and offers sharp observations and felicities of phrase, as when he writes that a Midwestern transplant to the Appalachians is “considered a bit standoffish, or reserved, depending on how much it mattered to you.” This is dead on – a subtle point made briskly and without calling attention to himself.

But the book's problems outweigh its pleasures. Wolfe cobbles his protagonist from spare parts and cliches, leaving no triteness unturned. In describing Charlotte's hometown, family and dwelling-place, he checks off the cliches one by one: toothless, tarpaper, propane tank, picnic table inside the house. When Wolfe needs Charlotte to be artless and sheltered, she is, in spades. She arrives at college never having read a glossy magazine or stayed in a hotel.

To emphasize her moral peril at a fraternity party, Wolfe has Charlotte recall the most traumatic sin of her youth: at 12, she unthinkingly followed her friend's lead and … jaywalked! Jaywalking is of course an urban offense; mountain hamlets with three stoplights don't have walk signals, nor do citizens of such towns hesitate to cross empty streets – and why would Charlotte remember such an incident, years later, as a genuine ethical lapse?

Wolfe's preoccupation with testosterone also leads him astray. He fixates on campus preserves of unchecked boy-id and boy-ego, sports and fraternities: “If America ever had to go to war again … there would be only one source of officers other than the military academies: frat boys. They were the only educated males left who were conditioned to think and react … like men.” Wolfe's fascination with frats is easy to understand – but wouldn't Charlotte scorn these repellent creatures and their macho entitlements? Why is level- headed Charlotte susceptible? Because Wolfe insists that every character share his priorities, first among these the quest to obtain and preserve status.

Wolfe's unwillingness to allow characters to differ from himself is the book's most conspicuous flaw. In addition, he can't help but insert himself into the novel. Wolfe repeatedly interrupts a character's musing to apply a gloss or to lodge another complaint against the Zeitgeist. To a vivid description of the cluttered college-newspaper office he appends this old-mannish carping: “not that anybody at the Wave … had ever heard of 'Front Page' or its era, more than seventy years ago, back in the last century, which to college students today was prehistory.” Each of those last three clauses is authorial self- indulgence, lily-gilding that contributes neither to character nor plot.

At another point Charlotte reflects on whether academic prowess will be enough to sustain her at Dupont, as it did in high school: Does she need friends? After a convincing bit of soul-searching from her perspective, Wolfe tacks this on: “She shuddered with a feeling she couldn't have put a name to. It was the congenital human fear of isolation.” He can't resist stepping past the proscenium to issue a wisdom, take a bow, name a Congenital Human Fear. In Wolfe's journalism, these authorial intrusions usually provide necessary context, assign meaning to experience. In his novel it's just, well, an intrusion.

Wolfe's interventions are so frequent and so blatant that several scenes read like parables in search of a sermon. Sermonizing can work in polemical nonfiction, but it's a clumsy trick in fiction, where characters' inner lives are paramount.

There's a deep irony here: Wolfe's New Journalism was attacked for bringing the tools of fiction to journalism in illegitimate ways; he was accused of being a fictionist in reporter's clothing. The trouble with “I Am Charlotte Simmons” is the converse. Wolfe hasn't abandoned the tools of journalism enough, hasn't allowed himself the leap of empathy that makes for extraordinary fiction. Therefore one never fully believes in Charlotte's interior life; she is used almost as roughly and thoughtlessly by her creator as by the frat boy who seduces and discards her.

The novel's chief weakness is encapsulated in its title. In the book, the phrase serves as Charlotte's mantra of self-confidence, but it may also be read – Wolfe demands that it be read – as authorial braggadocio: Tom Wolfe is the only I here, and he wants the reader to know it. He is Charlotte Simmons. The reader is never allowed to forget the white-suited alpha-male sage who's pulling the strings – the eminence whose initials dominate the front cover and whose nearly full-length portrait adorns the rear jacket. In this novel, when character and author, empathy and preachment, or insight and ego come into conflict, the outcome is predictable. As the kids say, Who's your daddy?

(Michael Griffith teaches English at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of the novel “Spikes” and the short story collection “Bibliophilia.”)