The Eventual Gander

(Schiavo/PopeWatch 2k5: Mortality always wins)

Here at the Enfranchised, we read a lot. Just... not quickly. So, hitherwith, we introduce our review masthead: The Eventual Gander. That's not to say we'll review anything less than the pinnacle and forefront of pseudo-intellectual circles. As the saying goes: What's good for the prompt goose is good for the eventual gander.

Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons

When Ansel Adams passed away, he willed the negatives of all of his photographs as a tangible possession. Celebrity worship aside (in the current day and age a man of his stature could leave a receipt on a table after dinner and find it on eBay by dessert), he did this because he felt they had value. To him, taking a picture was composed of two equally important steps: first exposing the film to capture an image, and then turning this semi-Platonic abstraction into bona fide hangible art through the process of printing. Writing is like this too, and in I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe has succeeded admirably at the first but managed to hide that fact beneath severe stumbling in the second.

Without appearing too pathetic, allow me to say that Wolfe is spot-on in many instances. Speaking of that opportunity to slip one's alma mater into conversation, he writes (of the fictional Dupont College), "Everyone, male or female, who was right now, as he was, in the undergraduate division, Dupont College, or had ever graduated from Dupont College knew that feeling, treasured that feeling, sought one way or another to enjoy that feeling daily if at all possible, now and for the rest of his life". If this sounds horribly pretentious and off-putting, well, it is. Which is why, he continues, "no Dupont man... had ever tried to describe it out loud to a living soul." He continues to observe the intermittent cycle of a freshman's life: from the heights of arrogance to the troughs of self -doubt and -pity. This, of course, while the self is trodding through a life of intellectual luxury on someone else's tab with no responsibilities to speak of. Trivial matters such as sides of the room, borrowings of discs compact, unfounded crushes are such stuff as life and death are made during a co-ed's career. Translate to the language of rap, this would best be put, "Mo' Education, Mo' Problems."

He has his other bones to pick, of course. One of the title heroine's suitors is the star of a basketball team. Wolfe has applied his expert eye to the NCAA, endorsement deals, groupies, just about every morsel of the Big Man On Campus Phenomenon. He dissects feelings of parental shame and familial denial. These are all spot on observation, etc. Thus ends the positive portion of my review, such as it is.

The imperfections, on the other hand, are many. And yet, somehow, the critics got them wrong. Many were shocked at the lurid and, quite frankly, unarousing descriptions of intimacy he includes. Wolfe took home an award for worst sex scene of the year. What the committee missed was that it was not the worst scene of sex. It was a great scene of the worst sex. He distorts his writing because that is how it is in the trenches of modern fraternity houses and two-room doubles. But he never lets up. His writing is awkward and the characters stiff throughout the whole novel, as if college is something to be experienced for all eight semesters through a lens of discomfort. The result approximates a really interesting person with bad breath: you force your way through to the end because you know you will enjoy having heard it, even if the experience itself is excruciating.

One of nine-thousand and seventy-three sayings attributed to Mark Twain is "Show, Don't Tell." Wolfe apparently decided to piss on the House of Clemens. Well, okay, you say. Sometimes you just don't have the space to do all that. But in a book that winds through 676 pages and weighs enough to take down a gazelle if the situation arises, you think he really could have pointed out that athletics is a golden ticket with more subtlety than "the sweet irony was that [basketball player extraordinaire but less-than-stellar-academician] had wound up at a better university than Eric [(the smarter but less-baller brother)]."

The bigger issue is that this is Tom Wolfe. At every turn, in every nook of prose and cranny of words, you can see the man in his white suit typing out this introduction to a new world. He shows off, dropping terms as if they were names. He clues in the reader to the lingo: "dormcest" is mentioned by an "RA" as a type of "hooking up". And yet the actual act is still "rutting", which is often preceded by simulation of the "mons veneris" and the "ilial crest". Thanks Tom. Just what I needed: a newly old man to turn his attention to my home to tell me how bad it is, all the while knowing that he really wants to be back there. To be where the culture is being made, where it is being blindly felt in the backseat of an Escalade on the way to a formal. Your criticism would mean a lot more if it weren't compensation for jealousy.


In the end, I am Charlotte Simmons should never be allowed in the fiction section of a bookstore. Instead, copies of it should be relegated to that part of a college bookstore next to a sweatshirt bearing the (trademarked) logo of these cathedrals of learning, money, and semi-anonymized semi-drunk semi-dancing semi-sex. That way, when Mom and Pop come to visit Junior and Juniess, all settled into their dorms, they can pick up a hat or fanny pack for expressing their pride in public, and a copy of I am Charlotte Simmons for abating their curiosity and empty nesting in private.