Review
I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS
by Tom Wolfe
HarperCollins Canada, 676 pp.
It’s hard to discuss a work that is a total disaster. To begin by saying "no redeeming merits whatsoever" is a rather bold claim – but in fact, this may be one of the worst books I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of books.
It’s a warm Sunday afternoon. Tom Wolfe rises from his coffin, puts on his most ridiculous pair of pantaloons and brushes the dust from his shoulders. "Well," he says, "it was dope in the ’60s, and apparently the ’00s are characterized by sex and illiteracy, so I suppose I’d better write a King James Bible-sized tome to document it. After all, I’m Tom Wolfe."
Was there nobody around to tell him how dreadful this idea was? (Maybe not – his picture on the book jacket looks like Sam the American Eagle after doing rails of coke all afternoon; a person like that wouldn’t listen to anybody.) I Am Charlotte Simmons is a 700-page novel describing an intelligent woman’s deflowering in excruciating detail. Even assuming that this genre of cotton-candy social realism has any merit (which it doesn’t), is he so pompous as to think that none of us have any taste?
The book follows the college adventures of young Charlotte Simmons, a recent high school graduate from North Carolina. She hopes to escape her poor, bucktoothed family for the greater promises of a higher education, which, according to her teacher, will give her more than a life of raising children in a dugout.
However, Wolfe is mainly concerned with portraying her as a sexually naïve child, and spends the first 200 pages preparing her like a pig about to be stuck on the spit (literally). The other half of this doorstop revolves around the black-white dichotomy on the college basketball court, where Wolfe concludes that the players must all hate each other. These scenes contain some of the more repugnant passages, which at times border on racist.
So Wolfe has concluded that American beer and ass have destroyed the ivory tower of post-secondary institution. What a surprise. In truth, Wolfe is only concerned with appearing erudite and relevant, two things that this novel is not.
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