Je ne sais pas pour quelle raison, mais je suis un grand fan d’un sous-genre littéraire – ce n’est pas péjoratif – relativement confidentiel portant le nom de campus novel et qui désigne – comme son nom l’indique – un roman se déroulant au sein d’une université. Je pense que tout a commencé avec les romans de  David Lodge, la Trilogie de Rummidge, puis avec le livre de  Donna Tartt  Le maître des illusions, s’est poursuivi avec  Le roman du mariage qui n’est pas dans le canon, mais s’en approche. Avec Moi, Charlotte Simmons par contre on est en plein dans l’archétype et c’est le grand  Tom Wolfe qui s’y colle. Le dandy a promené son costume blanc sur les campus – il n’a pas dû passer inaperçu – afin de collecter, comme à son habitude, le matériel nécessaire à l’écriture de son livre.

Comme personnage principal il s’est glissé dans la peau d’une fille, Charlotte qui est l’héroïne de ce roman. Comme dans la grande tradition des romans d’apprentissage, il s’agit d’une fille de la campagne, innocente et prude, qui va se retrouver plongée dans le grand bain. Malgré son talent, puisqu’elle est très douée, et sa détermination hors du commun, ce passage à l’université ne va pas être un parcours de santé. Tom Wolfe est un marionnettiste, en maître du genre il semble prendre un malin plaisir à faire souffrir ses personnages. On dirait qu’il les met à cuire dans un marmite, change la température progressivement, ajoute des épices, les fait cuire tour à tour à feu vif puis à petit feu. Je sais depuis la lecture de son livre Le bûcher des vanités que Tom Wolfe est un adepte du rise and fall théâtral. Alors on pourrait dire que c’est parfois caricatural, bourré de stéréotypes, exagéré, mais ça fait partie du jeu. On pourrait aussi arguer que c’est un peu long, mais ça vaut vraiment le coup car ce livre regorge de moments d’anthologie.

Également publié sur mon blog.

I really appreciated the plotting and how completely Wolfe plunges the reader into the modern university. In fact, it seems like this could easily have been set at UNC-Chapel Hill. That said, he really did spend more time than strictly necessary with his lurid prose about the variegated body types on campus and the frequency with which students thought about sex and acted upon those thoughts. A crazy amount of foul language, as you might expect.

I say all this knowing full well that my objections are probably what makes it such a fully drawn out experience of Charlotte, Adam, JoJo, and Hoyt. So, you know, take it for what it’s worth.

Is this the most innovative, unpredictable novel ever written? Nope, but I can't deny that Wolfe's nasty, satirical pageturner about millennial college life in the US is great fun. Protagonist Charlotte Simmons has grown up in the small town of Sparta, NC, in a conservative working class environment. When she starts college at the prestigious Dupont University, well-known for academic excellence and its successful athletics department (hello, Duke), virginal Charlotte has trouble fitting in with the more worldly rich kids, Greek letter organizations, and jocks. Aspiring to reach a higher position in the on-campus pecking order, she takes some measures that, due to her naivety and the cruelty of the social order, soon get out of control...

Sure, Wolfe employs quite some stereotypes and cliches, but it's not like these don't exist in reality. Everybody in this book is more or less unlikeable, and it speaks volumes that reading the text is still so much fun: Charlotte is lonely and insecure, but she is also arrogant and ignorant - and so are many other characters. While the story is narrated in the third person, we perceive everything from Charlotte's perspective, which means that we witness her reasonings and justifications, and they are psychologically believable and well-rendered. The intricate psychological writing is juxtaposed with many flashy, over-the-top characters who do flashy, over-the-top things (rich kids being the meanest mean girls imaginable, sports stars having sex with groupies and cheating their way through classes, unpopular nerds founding nerd clubs and fantasizing about their future success etc. pp.).

Wolfe's held back, matter-of-fact narration shows how the students at Dupont strife for status, but the author does not judge them - in fact, he does not even present one character that offers appealing alternative ways of behavior. This set-up gives the book its light, satirical flair, and while the novel certainly qualifies as social commentary, it is no "o tempora, o mores" lament. I enjoyed the easy flow, the entertaining story and the many subplots of the text, so while this is no literary masterpiece, it's a good book that tells quite some truths about life in general.

Incidentally, the wonderful Hasan Minhaj has recently produced a great episode of "Patriot Act" entitled "Is College Still Worth It?", pondering some of the trends Wolfe talks about as well (but in the context of the Corona crisis).

I really enjoyed reading this book! It gave me so much to think about as I read through in terms of how we think about education, race, socio-economic status, gender, relationships, and popularity! Throughout the book I wished I was in a literature course where we could discuss. It adds a whole extra layer to the context to know that Tom Wolfe was a journalist and was in his eighties when he wrote it. I honestly can’t believe I have never read Wolfe before! Looking forward to reading more in the future!

Critics want to pretend this novel can be dismissed with the "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?" meme. Some of the play with a collegiate patois are ridiculous, but Wolfe has always been a bit ridiculous with language. It is misguided to leverage this as a convenient way to ignore what's revealed by Wolfe's satirical attention.

This novel cuts right to the fundamental problems of campus life after the 1960s. In the classroom, standards and rigor are in decline. In co-educational life, men and women are not forming productive, long-term relationships at the same rate because social etiquette and norms of sexual propriety have been tossed aside without viable replacements. And generally, the collegiate environment is failing to forge adults and discerning citizens. The system indulges them and traps them in their adolescent folly.

In many ways, Wolfe was ahead of the curve with his focus on the dysfunctional environments of post-secondary educational institutions, especially elite ones.

Dude, didja see her? Bra, check her out! She’s smokin’ hot, man! WAZZZZUPPPP, my bros! As the sounds of inane conversation filter above the bass thumping and pounding, you notice him. He looks, well, old. Arteriosclerotic. A fossil, for sure. Why is he here? He must be a narc. One of the deans, maybe? And what’s he wearing? A suit? Who wears a suit when you’re trying to be a narc? Not only that, it’s a white suit. Didn’t he get the memo, the black light party was LAST weekend. Huh. Definitely some kind of narc. He’s not trying to fit in and dance to the music the way the other narcs do, using dated college slang from the 1980’s. He’s not trying to mack on the hotties, either. He seems impervious to their loamy loins, although he might be too old to notice—he’s not in the season of the rising sap anymore! He’s just standing there, holding a hulking green notebook in his hands, scribbling down something. It’s so dark in here, how can he even see what he’s writing down? Super weird.

In Tom Wolfe’s third novel, 2004’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe presents the reader with a very detailed picture of Charlotte Simmons’ first semester at the fictional Dupont University. Dupont is a well-regarded academic institution that also wins national championships in basketball. Wolfe said of Dupont that it was based on “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, and a few other places all rolled into one.” (Quoted in the Yale Alumni magazine.)

Charlotte Simmons is a brilliant young woman who graduated valedictorian from Sparta High School in Sparta, North Carolina, a small town in the northwest corner of the state. Charlotte has her sights set on getting out of Sparta, and she gets a scholarship to attend Dupont, the college of her dreams.

But Charlotte has a rude awakening in store for her when she gets to Dupont. Charlotte is disappointed to discover that a lot of the focus at Dupont is on frat parties and drinking, and not so much on “the life of the mind,” as she had hoped. Her roommate, Beverly, is a shallow rich girl who is only concerned with Charlotte when she needs the dorm room for a tryst.

I Am Charlotte Simmons also follows “Jojo” Johanssen, the only white starting player on the Dupont basketball team. Through Johanssen’s story arc, Wolfe offers a sharp critique of college athletic programs that treat their players as prized ponies, giving them preferential treatment at every turn, and keeping them isolated from the rest of the undergraduates. Through an encounter with Charlotte, Jojo suddenly, and perhaps somewhat improbably, seeks to take more challenging classes, much to the chagrin of his basketball coach.

Jojo has an academic tutor to help him pass his classes, Adam Gellin. Adam is a smart, hard-working student who also delivers pizzas in his spare time. Adam meets Charlotte, and in addition to being struck by her beauty, he finds someone who is also searching for something more from the college experience than a round of parties.

Another major character is the douchebag frat boy Hoyt Thorpe. Like all the other males in the novel, Hoyt encounters Charlotte and finds her very beautiful. As a senior, Hoyt has anxiety about his future, as his academic transcript is less than stellar.

One of the most outstanding parts of the book is the novella-length section that recounts Charlotte’s overnight trip as Hoyt’s date to his fraternity formal in Washington, DC. The whole trip is a disaster from the beginning, as Charlotte suffers through an awkward car ride with juniors and seniors that she doesn’t know. The other girls mock Charlotte’s Southern accent, and she feels very isolated. When the group checks into the hotel, Charlotte is surprised that she doesn’t have her own hotel room, and instead will have to share a room with Hoyt and another couple. Charlotte gets very drunk during the formal, and as night turns into morning, Hoyt has sex with her. Charlotte is a virgin and bleeds on the bedsheets, disgusting Hoyt. Charlotte is impaired from her drinking, and her consent is hazy at best. Throughout these painful chapters, you’re hoping that somehow Charlotte will extricate herself from this awful situation and that the evening won’t turn out the way you fear it will. When Charlotte returns to campus, the story of her losing her virginity quickly makes the rounds of Dupont, and she finds herself socially ostracized.

Michiko Kakutani called the novel’s sex scenes “gross” and “leering” in her New York Times review, but it’s clear the scene is supposed to be extremely uncomfortable. There’s nothing erotic or sexy about it. When Wolfe was interviewed on NPR about the sex scenes, he said, “I wanted these scenes to be as impersonal as, in fact, they are.”

On a lighter note, there are several in jokes in I Am Charlotte Simmons for Tom Wolfe fans to enjoy. Hoyt Thorpe is pursued by the bond firm Pierce & Pierce, which is the company that Sherman McCoy worked for in The Bonfire of the Vanities. The law firm of Dunning, Sponget, and Leach, first introduced in Bonfire, makes an appearance towards the end of the novel. Streptolon, Wolfe’s favorite fictional synthetic material, first introduced in his writing in the late 1960’s and name-checked in nearly all of his books, appears here as warm-up pants and the webbing for a deck chair. As usual, people are packed “shank to flank,” numerous young women have “loamy loins,” and many young men are going through “the season of the rising sap.” Wolfe also briefly references one of his favorite novels, James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, a masterpiece of the kind of detailed, naturalistic fiction that Wolfe favored.

Wolfe nails the details of his characters, from Charlotte’s occasional upspeak, to Adam’s desire to show off his knowledge, to Jojo’s insecurity when a hotshot African American player threatens his role as a starter. Wolfe was a master of the neuroses of the male psyche, as he saw with sharp clarity how males present themselves in society in order to establish their places in the status hierarchy.

Wolfe gives all his characters vivid, detailed backstories, showing us how they have journeyed to this point in their lives, and how things like class, status, and money have formed them. Wolfe’s attention to details helps him create a vibrant picture of college life at the turn of the millennium.

I Am Charlotte Simmons was savaged by reviewers when it was released in the fall of 2004. Many critics complained about Wolfe trying to create credible characters that were fifty years younger than he was. However, as someone who went to college during the time that Wolfe was writing the novel, I found it to be a very accurate depiction of college life, even though the college I attended was very different from Dupont University. I think it’s a major achievement of Wolfe’s that he was able to create vibrant characters that were fifty years younger than he was. If you want to know what college was like in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, read I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Tom Wolfe thinks that it is idiotic that our culture sends our virginal daughters away to elite colleges that feature co-ed dorms and bathrooms and sexual mores only slightly more restrained than a hamster colony. IRL he sent his daughter to Duke and here he sends his titular heroine to Du(pont). This is a father's lament.

Nevertheless, Charlotte is a believable character for the most part. She is a non-elite raised by the American meritocracy into an institutional bastion of elitism. Like J.D. Vance at Yale Law, she is out of her depth at first, but largely finds her way towards success. That success is temporarily derailed by a frat boy boyfriend

However, Wolfe is not merely content to weigh (and find wanting) our cultural patterns towards courtship during the college years. Instead, he allows himself to cast Charlotte as an Athena--a true form of academic endeavor--and have her be confronted with three possible suitors. There is (1) the frat boy Hoyt who represents non-intellectual boyish thumos and cultural status, (2) the nerd Adam who desires more than anything to shape the broader culture either by becoming a professor or, better yet, a Public Intellectual, and (3) and finally the jock JoJo who is at Dupont merely to make it to the League. While Charlotte receives suit from each of the three in turn, none of them truly serve her true nature. Hoyt's unchecked sex drive deflowers her, while Adam, in turn, is too egg-headed to stir her to any passion at all. Charlotte does have a small positive impact on JoJo, convincing him to actually try to study, but in the end she is defined by her relationship to JoJo. Metaphorically, Wolfe is saying that the University has ultimately become something like the girlfriend of its Athletic Programs.

Well ... I had never read any Tom Wolfe before. I had read and heard several things about this book - namely, how Wolfe researched by exploring college culture, attending parties and interviewing students and such. The resulting fiction is a paltry attempt at immersion journalism at best. I know, I know, Wolfe wasn't trying to tell a true story (and naturally, no one compares to my journalistic hero Leon Dash) but instead write a fictional piece exploring the seamier side of collegiate life at an upper-crust University. At least, I think that's what he was trying to do. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the book. In fact, it was very readable and pretty entertaining. I think it just fell far short of what Mr. Wolfe feels (or hopes) he accomplished.

You can just tell by reading the book that it was written by someone who ALMOST but doesn't quite, get it. It has that outsider's perspective, but not in the loner, misunderstood sense. I'm not sure exactly how to put this but I hope this makes it clear what I am trying to say. It feels like the book was written by someone who has no idea what they are talking about, yet feels they have completely mastered the topic. Wolfe overuses tools like slang, pop culture references, etc. to try and make it seem like he really knows what he's talking about. It's like that nerdy kid who desperately tries to seem cool by doing things like liking really obscure music, or quoting the Simpson's ad nauseum, or constantly talking about their drinking habits and crazy drunken adventures. You knew that kid in college. We all did.

Anyhow, the protagonist, the titular Charlotte Simmons, is an outsider, so Wolfe's strategy does work to an extent. But she is a strangely implausible character at times, as are some of the others. And not implausible in the way that all people are, more like implausible as in some of the characters do things that are directly contradictory to their intial presentation (I am thinking of Laurie, Charlotte's best friend, in particular). Charlotte leads a life of near-constant mortification. Her embarassment, at least as written, is so intense at all times that it must be simply exhausting. It left me wondering how, in this perpetually self-conscious state, she managed to both be a genius, and have an extremely high level of confidence in both her intellect and physical appearance. This self-confidence seemed at complete odds with her extreme, even desperate desire to fit in. It was strange also, that she felt superior to everyone yet wanted to be their leader. I suppose this is not unusual, in fact it's almost cliched. But it's still strange, to me at least. The characters are poorly developed. There are actually too many characters in my opinion. They all revolve around each other and interact, but some in only the most fleeting of ways. And (THIS MIGHT RUIN IT IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT) some who are introduced as being very influential in Charlotte's life are referenced only briefly again, and conflicts are never resolved.

In short, the characters, even Charlotte, are shallow. We are given the gist of what it is that Charlotte desires, and even a glimpse into her inner turmoil, but it is still unclear to me WHY she wants the things she wants, and why she seems to have two personalities - one which wants to be intellectual, one which wants to be "cool". She grows angry whenever she is recognized as one or the other, though - when around cool people she wants them to know how smart she is and vice-versa. She doesn't seem to find a way to let these two aspects of herself co-exist. Which I suppose is very typical of a college freshman. However, the resolution of the book was unsatisfying. Basically what I came away with - Smart people do stupid things, too. Duh.

Overall, it was intriguing and kept me entertained on the plane

On the topic of hoops fiction (w/ Boice), I decided to bust this dust gathering doorstop out of the bookshelf graveyard.
Having read excerpts of this upon publication, I decided to skip two of the three plot lines - those of Charlotte (small-town every girl meets big time state school) and Hoyt (the Reede Seligmann model) for the story of Jojo (white hoops player trying to make good on a squad of aggressive, do-me, Adonis black dudes).
I guess not surprisingly Wolfe succeeds greatly in portraying a top-notch D1 hoops program - and the politics that go with it.
The only trouble I had with the team he imagines is the clear-cut distinction he makes between the white + black players (almost a sharks v jets rivalry) which I never found to be the case.

Sigh.

771 pages. Talking about college. How college is shocking for sheltered girls. How college (shocker) isn't really about academia, but sports, beer, sex, and pretty much everything that the university brochures lie about in order to protect their reputations and continue charging $30,000 a year for an "education." This could be written by ANYONE, and in less than HALF the pages.

When a book is bad, and too long, there is a certain point in reading the same shit over and over when your mind just screams SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!. This happened to me about half way through when I got sick of even the most random characters who appear only once in the story, having their entire family histories mapped out for the reader since the 1800's. Filler? Some sort of psychological explanation of the character? NO. BORING. EDITOR?? WHERE ARE YOU!? CUT THIS SHIT. Also, we don't need every single regional accent spelled out for us. Charlotte is from the South. We don't need to be reminded after the says "get" that she pronounces it "git." We don't need to be told that a dude from Brooklyn says "what do you want?" and then have it rewritten again after the quote as "whaddaya want?". Fuck me. If that wasn't enough, can we stop this shit of "shooting looks that are as if to say...."? He shot her a look as if to say fuck you, she shot him a look as if to say I hate you, etc. UGH.

Granted, this book did get the Bad Sex Award in 2003. But since it doesn't even happen until page 2394875485723847, it's not just BAD, it's boring. How anyone managed to FIND this bad sex without skimming over it or simply falling asleep is completely beyond me. I'm shocked that this didn't get the Bad Book Award of 2003.

If you want a good, engaging, and true-to-life story about a fish out of water in her academic environment, read Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep. Use I am Charlotte Simmons only for expensive toilet paper or to stop a bullet.

Sucked.

SIX STARS! Recently graduated, I resonated with this novel! Over ten years later, this could not be a more true rendition of how corrupt, backwards, and retroactive the whole construct of "higher" education is, and how far our Education system has fallen.

The critical lens Wolfe holds up to the sadistic, infantile culture at our universities creates a beautiful, moving satire that speaks to the destroyed world we allowed these kids to desecrate.

a 70-something year old man with an amazingly well-researched version of college life. SPOILER ALERT: the ending was stupid.