An Unsentimental Education

I Am Charlotte Simmons, which many people believe to be Tom Wolfe’s crudest and most offensive book, played an important part in my moral education. When I think about the novel now, I think about a girl who used to go to the college bookstore for the express purpose of reading it. She would pick it up from the front display table, climb to the balcony, and sit on the floor behind a large white column that was broad enough to hide her from the clerks and the customers below. She would read, with an air of intense absorption, about people who seemed to her very much like the people she had met in her first year at an old East Coast university, which in turn seemed very much like Dupont University, where the novel was set. Its heroine, the beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous Charlotte Simmons, had arrived at Dupont from Sparta, North Carolina, a river town with no industry other than Christmas tree farms. Lacking money and culture and connections, she possessed nothing but her simple faith in the university as the place where she would finally be recognized for what she was: exceptional in mind and body, and pure of heart.

Yet Dupont also seemed designed to test her faith. The students did very little reading or writing. Instead, they smoked and drank and stumbled in and out of crowded parties, where they shouted at one another in a peculiar language (“You’re money, baby, and you don’t even know it!” “Sexy-prexy!”) and laughed at nothing in particular. They had sex, never with pleasure, and they woke up in strange beds with shame and regret. They betrayed their friends casually, cruelly—although “betrayed” was not the right word, for among them there was no expectation of loyalty or respect.

Charlotte Simmons tried to rise above the lure of sex and money and social status, the fatal desire to be someone whom everyone knew and talked about. “I am Charlotte Simmons,” she liked to say. “Charlotte Simmons was above them all.” But she could not hold out against the squalor of campus life. She lost her virginity to a handsome fraternity brother in the fall and became incurably depressed, losing all interest in her books, in her appearance, in the life of the mind she had been so eager to lead—until she emerged from her hibernation in the spring as the girlfriend of the basketball team’s star forward. The girl I knew returned to the bookstore to read and reread the novel, hoping perhaps for a different ending. Each time it was the same, and each time its finality angered her, then strengthened her resolve. People like Charlotte Simmons might waste the opportunities that had accrued to them. But she was not Charlotte Simmons. She was above it all.

Twenty years later I can look at my young self and wonder that she should have understood so little—about the novel, and about the university, the relentless pressure it exerts on the souls of its inhabitants. A person who prided herself on withstanding this pressure would not only end up surrendering to it like everyone else but also experience her surrender as tragic, while everyone else would merely smile at her naiveté and self-importance. I had failed to understand this because, like Charlotte Simmons, I believed in the university. I believed in it in the same way that many people believed in the church, as a place of the purest and highest purpose. Walking through its gates had seemed to me an act of rebirth. Everyone was washed clean. Nothing that came before counted against you—not where you were born, or where you went to high school, or how much money your family had—and everything that came after depended only on your innate and enduring gifts: your discipline, your intuition, the sheer velocity of your thought. I had also failed to understand it because, like Charlotte Simmons, I maintained a stubborn sense of my own exceptionality. I believed that my mind and my character were as inviolable as the university I had entered. Or rather, I believed that our fates were entwined in some grand human drama in which I played a vital role, and whose outcome I could imagine only as triumphant.

Campus novels summon this essentially romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one or two deceived mortals. I Am Charlotte Simmons is no exception. Indeed, it can be quite literal-minded in its allusions to the grove of academe. In the prologue, “The Dupont Man,” two drunk fraternity brothers, Hoyt and Vance, leave a concert and walk through the center of campus:

The Great Yard at its heart, the quadrangles of the older residential colleges, a botanical garden, two floral lawns with gazebos, tree-studded parking lots, but, above all, this arboreal masterpiece, the Grove, so artfully contrived you would never know Dupont was practically surrounded by the black slums of a city as big as Chester, Pennsylvania.

In this paradise of white American splendor, the boys stumble upon the commencement speaker, the Republican governor of California, a man of old-fashioned family values, getting a blow job from a female student. The serpent, it appears, is already in the garden. When Hoyt fights the governor’s bodyguard and wins, a rush of irrational masculine pride convinces him that he and his fraternity brothers have a superior evolutionary claim to the university, that their choice of fight over flight means that they belong there more than “the academic geeks, book humpers, homosexuals, flute prodigies, and other diversoids who were now being admitted.” “There’s their Dupont, which is just a diploma with ‘Dupont’ written on it…and there’s the real Dupont—which is ours!” he thinks.

Several hundred miles away there is another grove: the town of Sparta, whose “dense, deep green stands of virgin forest set against the immense ashy backdrop of the Blue Ridge” cut the townsfolk off from the rest of the state. “Primeval is precisely the word for it,” Wolfe explains, before introducing us to Charlotte Simmons, valedictorian, Presidential Scholar, the great hope of her simple, God-fearing people, through a series of apparently detached and objective statements. “That particular girl, Charlotte Simmons, was very much a star”—and we believe that she is as a matter of fact, not opinion. Gradually we begin to recognize these thoughts as Charlotte’s. They are her first line of defense against the popular girls and boys, whose attention she appears to disdain yet secretly covets: “In this moment of stardom, with practically everybody she knew looking on, she felt almost as much guilt as triumph. But triumph she did feel, and guilt has been defined as the fear of being envied.” Yet it hardly changes how we understand her. Wolfe has cultivated the myth of Charlotte’s exceptionality for us, and the inhabitants of Sparta have cultivated it within her. Her parents and her teachers, outwardly afraid of sin, cannot see how they have planted it deep in Charlotte’s soul and encouraged it to grow. Her longing for the university is the first sign of her pride—her desire to have her superior character consecrated by “the real Dupont,” where, she believes, she will forget the people of Sparta. “The simple truth is that Charlotte Simmons exists on a plane far above them,” Wolfe reports, through her eyes.

Here, then, are our Dupont man and our Dupont woman, and if they are not exactly Adam and Eve, then they are, like all of us, distant relations. They will meet in the grove of academe, its dorm rooms and fraternity houses populated by a cast of sensational characters. There is “JoJo” Johanssen, the only white star on Dupont’s championship basketball team, anxious that he will lose his spot in the starting lineup to a talented black freshman. There are the “Millennial Mutants” of the school newspaper, a group of aspiring management consultants and Rhodes Scholars whose leader, a virginal senior named Adam Gellin, falls pathetically in love with Charlotte. There are the fraternity brothers, the Saint Rays, gruesome sexual predators, and Charlotte’s roommate, Beverly, a bitchy and expensively made-up party girl from Groton. There are a pair of hangers-on, Bettina and Mimi, who seem to be aware that they are bit players in someone else’s drama.

But who is Charlotte Simmons, really? Who are any of the characters in this lurid carnival of college life? From behind their procession peeps the distinct face of Tom Wolfe, with his round blue eyes and his proud, thin smile, his white hair, and his even whiter suit. When I Am Charlotte Simmons was first published in 2004, it seemed impossible to set aside his conservative politics, his outrageous persona, and, quite simply, his age—he had just turned seventy-four—and imagine him proclaiming, “I am Charlotte Simmons.” Yet it was no more absurd than Gustave Flaubert’s famous declaration, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” Madame Bovary is the first novel that we see Charlotte reading, and it offers a clue to Wolfe’s ambition: to use Flaubert’s free indirect style, his rendering of first-person thoughts in third-person narration, to inhabit a character, or a series of characters, further removed from his station and situation than the Merry Pranksters of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) or the bond traders of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). But a funnier clue is dropped into the prologue: before Hoyt and Vance set out on their walk, at the concert, Hoyt stands in front of a bathroom mirror, admiring his perfect jaw and eyes and teeth and flexing his biceps. Suddenly he experiences a revelation, a moment of altered consciousness:

He felt like he was a second person looking over his own shoulder. The first him was mesmerized by his own good looks. Seriously. But the second him studied the face in the mirror with detachment and objectivity…. He was on the verge of a profound discovery. It had to do with one person looking at the world through two pairs of eyes.

The image of one person looking through two pairs of eyes recalls a line from Wolfe’s 1972 article “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism,’” which provided instructions to readers for how to write nonfiction with “personality, energy, drive, bravura”: “Shift as quickly as possible into the eye sockets, as it were, of the people in the story.” The echo of it in I Am Charlotte Simmons reminds us that free indirect style is, and always has been, the vast open plain on which realism meets the New Journalism. If this has been difficult to appreciate, or even to note, it is because Wolfe worked hard to obscure it, loudly championing the naturalism of Balzac or Zola as “realistic” (whatever that meant), and because nothing could have been further from the restrained irony of Flaubert’s style than Wolfe’s extravagance. What James Wood decried as the “enormous excitability” of Wolfe’s prose—his crowded sentences, his noisy passion for italics, exclamation marks, ellipses, and capital letters—threatened to drown out the distinctive thoughts of his characters. By accident, this style proved better suited to representing college students than any of Wolfe’s other subjects. It captured their unflagging energy, the energy of youth. It ventriloquized their thoughts and speech in an idiom that was at once charming and inventive, stupid and cruel. Its homogeneity was appropriate. No matter how many kinds of people, of how many races and creeds, gained admission to the grove, Wolfe believed that the elite university remained a fundamentally closed system, an echo chamber of knowing references to movies and television shows, of sarcasm and slang, curses and song lyrics. It was as if, in the figure of the drunk, arrogant boy marveling at his own reflection, Wolfe had finally found the emblem of his style. “Where was the writer who would immortalize that feeling?” Hoyt asks of his double vision. “C’est moi,” the author answers from behind him.

If adopting Flaubert’s narrative technique was relatively straightforward, then adapting the plot of Madame Bovary—a provincial woman with outsized social ambitions is seduced and ruined—posed a challenge. Having sex was no longer taboo or even especially eventful, at least not for Wolfe’s class of readers. “In the nineteenth century, entire shelves used to be filled with novels whose stories turned on the need for women, such as Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, to remain chaste or to maintain a façade of chastity,” he wrote in his essay “Hooking Up,” published a few years before I Am Charlotte Simmons. “In the year 2000, a Tolstoy or a Flaubert wouldn’t have stood a chance in the United States.” For Wolfe to stand a chance in 2004, he had to convince the reader that there was something at stake in our heroine’s chastity. He had to make us believe that our heroine was just that—a heroine, beautiful, blameless, and unworldly to the point of stupidity. We encounter her first through her own eyes and then through the eyes of her suitors: Jojo, a noble idiot, and Adam, a nerdy misogynist. Jojo clumsily likens Charlotte to “an illustration from one of those fairy-tale books where the young woman is under a spell or something.” Adam, whose language is more florid and, in turn, more repulsive, admires the “absolutely clear, open, guileless beauty” of her face: “It was opening, opening, opening like the tender virginal bud of the most gorgeous flower revealing its virginal petals to the world with a sublime innocence and at the same time a sublime invitation.”

We continue to believe in her worthiness even as Wolfe lets us glimpse her deficiencies. There is her pride, her vanity. There is her puritanism and what it conceals—a fascination with the flesh so intense that, were it ever to surface, it would force her to admit that she, Charlotte Simmons, was as hungry for sex as any sorority girl and as misogynistic as any frat boy in her derision of this desire. “Slut!” she thinks of Beverly. “Her crawling, drooling, sobbing, slobbering slut of a roommate.” We know Charlotte is no Eve in her bower, just as we know Hoyt is no Satan. Like Charlotte, he is a scholarship kid, “blithely covering up his past and manufacturing a pedigree” to blend in with his wealthy and well-connected fraternity brothers. His insecurity props up his sense of grandeur. It is as wobbly a shield as Jojo’s “smug feeling of superiority” when he dunks the ball—he envisions himself on top of a “fortress,” a white king looking down at his enthralled black subjects—or Adam’s family romance, a persistent daydream in which he appears as “a brilliant and infinitely promising young star who had been born to the wrong parents,” poor, divorced, and Jewish.

It is hard for people who see this novel as a story of sexual morality to realize that Charlotte and her suitors are more alike than they seem. All four of them are the striving children of working-class white parents. All four are willful class traitors, outsiders who have worked hard to become insiders only to realize that what the university promised them—cultural ennoblement and social uplift, a comfortable middle-class existence as a banker or a writer or a professor at a university like Dupont—is, in fact, a mirage, shimmering and inaccessible on the East Coast. They struggle to make sense of their ferocious resentments, the fear that they will be denied their rightful rewards because the university has failed to do what it was supposed to: separate the best and most deserving from the rest of society. And so the ugliest tendencies—racist paranoia, sexism, contempt for the working class—are seeded in the brightest minds. I Am Charlotte Simmons makes no attempt to predict the future, but twenty years after its publication we can well imagine how these tendencies will grow into a noxious strain of elite conservatism, how this naked resentment will cover itself with the “new sets of values” propounded by the governor of California, caught with his pants down in the Grove. We can even imagine, in 2025, one of these characters, maybe Charlotte Simmons herself, serving as vice-president of the United States.

This is where the parallels to Madame Bovary end. It would not make sense for Charlotte to die, not literally. Her instinct is to live, to adapt, to thrive. She may read French literature, but her true passion is evolutionary biology. It gives her the ruthlessly secular language she needs to observe her competition and plan her domination over them. “They were merely conscious little rocks, every one of them, whereas…I am Charlotte Simmons,” she thinks of the other 6,200 students at Dupont. She sees Hoyt as “the coolest and sleekest and most beautiful animal, the elite animal of the elite Dupont,” and herself as his prey. She dissects their sexual encounter, using the language of anatomy to deflect her shame (“Had his tongue just brushed the top of the hair on her mons?”), and she emerges from her painful deflowering with the ability to hide her true feelings. She learns how to see and be seen, to take what she can get from her suitors, from doting Adam and poor, unwitting Jojo, whom she enlists in her social resurrection as her new boyfriend. By the end of her freshman year, she has evolved into a cool, manipulative, dissembling creature, the hottest sorority pledge, her intellectual passion sacrificed on the altar of minor celebrity. There is no great tragedy in this. Nothing could be more commonplace. Yet it speaks to the success of the novel that we still sympathize with her in its final pages, as she watches Jojo at a basketball game and forgets to cheer with the crowd. “She sure hoped not too many had gotten a real eyeful of the glum, distracted, thoroughly uninterested look on her face. She clicked on the appropriate face just like that,” Wolfe writes. “It obviously behooved Jojo Johanssen’s girlfriend to join in.”

Reading it today, I find that I Am Charlotte Simmons agitates and excites me once more. It is a profoundly pessimistic novel, not because of its interest in conservative ideas or its sex panic, but because it refuses to grant its characters a moment’s reprieve from the social system that it so brutally and correctly indicts. Perhaps my optimism is simply self-protective; I have taught college students for over a decade now, and I like to believe that they have experiences that cannot be reduced to the quest for social dominance, that their desire to belong does not always end in the dreariest conformity. The most memorable scene in the novel takes place in an auditorium where Charlotte listens to her professor, a Nobel Prize–winning geneticist named Victor Ransome Starling, deliver an impassioned lecture on the history of neuroscience that touches on the theories of Darwin, Marx, and Freud, and the experiments of Walter Reed and José Delgado. To Charlotte, Professor Starling appears as a vision in tweed, “ineffably noble and majestic”:

As the sublime figure down on the stage moved in an electrifying succession of planes of chiaroscuro whose light, plus the light of the screen radiant with the image of the man who revolutionized the way the human animal sees herself, cast a glow upon the very crest of the heads of all the students—just that, the very crest, where here and there wisps of hair spun into pale golden gauze—Charlotte experienced a kairos, an ecstatic revelation of something too vast, too all-enveloping, too profound to be contained by mere words, and the rest of the world, a sordid world of the flesh and animals grunting for the flesh, fell away.

The world of the flesh, of money and status, can fall away for only so long, and, of course, it would be wrong to ignore Wolfe’s irony in this romantic portrayal of Professor Starling. But one hopes that the many Charlotte Simmonses who have lived since 2004 continue to experience, if only for a moment, these revelations of beauty, the ecstatic pleasures of knowledge as an end unto itself. Only then can they declare with pride, “Charlotte Simmons, c’est moi.”