When freshman Charlotte Simmons' pickup truck arrives from Sparta, North Carolina, bringing her and her few possessions to prestigious Dupont University, Dupont smells of "fresh meat." Like hordes of Orcs arrayed against the white tower of Minas Tirith, the forces of lust, envy and corruption gather against this small-town valedictorian with a body the other girls would kill to have — and so would the males, we soon discover. But Charlotte, whose full scholarship represents an opportunity to break a familial cycle of poverty and unemployment, has decided to pursue the life of the mind; her body is off-limits and her virginity intact. So great are the forces assembling beyond the battlements, however, that the reader senses that it is not a question of whether she will surrender, but of when and to whom. Striving to be the answer to the latter question are three college males: stereotypically, the jock, the frat boy, and the intellectual.
When the siege triumphs and the alabaster city falls, I find myself shedding tears few authors have evoked — Solzhenitsyn, for one — and ask myself, why? Is it that I wanted virtue to stand fast, if only symbolically, against lechery, greed, and pride? Is it that I have fallen love with this girl and had wanted her for myself? Perhaps, but it is more than that, I realize: I, too, am Charlotte Simmons, an Appalachian transplant into a strange and hostile world I embrace only after coercion, and her downfall is my own.
The uncanny resemblance of Dupont to Princeton is a testament to 71-year-old author Tom Wolfe's extensive re-acquaintance with college by cross-country tour and through faculty members at various institutions. Dupont is Number Two in the hated-yet-coveted U.S. News rankings, second only to Princeton. Dupont's elite fraternity is "Saint Ray's." There is an incident when the gay students' group's homoerotic expressions are removed by the janitorial staff — sound familiar? Social interactions are casual and shallow; including the phenomena that students introduce themselves by their first names only, and they "hook up" instead of dating, which is anachronism if not anathema. Clad in khaki shorts and polo shirts, they drink to oblivion and listen to Britney Spears' "In the Zone" and rap master Doctor Dis. And they have sex. Lots of sex.
The novel has irked those who prefer to look on the bright side of campus promiscuity, including Princeton's professor emerita Elaine Showalter, who huffs in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Titillated by the sexual revolution that has arrived on campus since his own student days, Wolfe totally misses the feminist revolution that has given us so many more women students, faculty members, deans and presidents." Perhaps Showalter's feminism can fail to rage against the plight of Charlotte Simmons, to lament the death of femininity, curiosity, and innocence. Mine cannot. Mine wept beside her on the blood-spattered bed.
What actually offends Showalter's sensibilities, it seems, is the decadence and even silliness of liberal academia in Wolfe's satirical mirror. Liberalism is on the march at Dupont, as evidenced by cohabitation, gender-neutral bathrooms and Gay Jeans Day, but to what end? Tom Wolfe's recent remarks to the Guardian about the cluelessness of the liberal elite, and the censure in his recent essay "Hooking Up," are honed to a wicked satirical point in this colossus of a novel. No wonder the Chronicle hated it.
Two characteristics distinguish Wolfe's work thematically from most novels of our day: masculinity and classicism. Not only do ghosts of peripatetic Greeks slip barely-noticed through his worlds, but the plots themselves assume classical tragic form, although not Aristotelian unities. Like bond trader Sherman McCoy in "Bonfire" and millionaire Charlie Croker in "A Man in Full," Charlotte Simmons passes through hubris to humiliation and a painful catharsis. In this form, Wolfe — writing Charlotte by hand — is heir to Aeschylus and a member of the cultural continuum we know as the Western Canon, something else liberals have been battering in recent years. In his trademark white suit, he is a living Dead White Male, and he smiles at fashion-conscious critics with the certainty that he will outlast them all.
The novel (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 676 pp. $28.95) is a substantial investment that will repay the reader immensely in humor and tragic beauty. Showalter was wrong; I enjoyed the novel immensely, and I enhanced my collegiate patois with such words as periphrastic, lapidary, Pantagruelian and cenacle.
In the novel, Wolfe has given us a masterpiece equal to "Bonfire," a hilarious and heartrending exposé of the moral and philosophical shortcomings of the modern university, its undergraduates and, yes, the academics and administrators who rule our tiny kingdom. However, Wolfe is not content with exposing the squalid state and sordid dealings of man. As a social critic of the first order, he illuminates a path upward.
Reading Charlotte Simmons, and basking in Wolfe's literary sunlight, should be required of each entering freshman here at Dupont.
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