Charlotte Simmons
Tom Wolfe's latest novel 'I am Charlotte Simmons' has received mixed reviews for its portrayal of life at the fictionalized US university, Dupont. For the Guardian's Jerome de Groot, the novel is, "Arrogant, prurient, self-regarding, verbose and ultimately a little shallow." At the other end of the scale, the Mail on Sunday called it, "A blistering indictment of contemporary standards." Both positions have some credibility.
In the plus column, the author captures the flavour of campus life at one of America's top colleges pretty well - at least according to friends who went to Ivy League schools. The 'sexiling', the one-upmanship and the shallowness are all real and pretty faithfully represented. He also skillfully integrates into the narrative some of the class and race issues that are often brushed under the carpet in the US, as well as ruthlessly exposing the hypocrysies of its college sports system.
However, by having a national champion basketball team and Nobel Prize winning lecturers at the same school, Wolfe has created a strange amalgam of Ivy League and state university. The idea seems to have been to make Dupont the 'ideal' US college, but the separation of the elite schools from the schools that pursue sporting excellence is an important distinction in the US and to elide these class differences is to miss the point a little.
Like Dupont University, the main characters too are essentially archetypes - brilliant but innocent outsider (Charlotte Simmons), frat boy (Hoyt Thorpe), nerd (Adam Gellin), jock (Jo Jo Johanssen), left-wing professor (Jerome Quat). Wolfe has drawn flak from de Groot and other critics for this one-dimensional characterization. For my part, the principals are detailed enough to be believable in the context of the story, which, as a synthesis of the bildungsroman form with the comedy of social manners, is, in any case, more concerned with plot development than character development.
The focus on plot and Wolfe's keen social anthropological eye means that the novel rarely drops in tempo, making turning the page no real effort. Although the various strands of the narrative come together nicely, the ending did feel a little glib, particularly after the sharpness of much of what had come earlier.
Final verdict: Flawed, but still worth reading.
In the plus column, the author captures the flavour of campus life at one of America's top colleges pretty well - at least according to friends who went to Ivy League schools. The 'sexiling', the one-upmanship and the shallowness are all real and pretty faithfully represented. He also skillfully integrates into the narrative some of the class and race issues that are often brushed under the carpet in the US, as well as ruthlessly exposing the hypocrysies of its college sports system.
However, by having a national champion basketball team and Nobel Prize winning lecturers at the same school, Wolfe has created a strange amalgam of Ivy League and state university. The idea seems to have been to make Dupont the 'ideal' US college, but the separation of the elite schools from the schools that pursue sporting excellence is an important distinction in the US and to elide these class differences is to miss the point a little.
Like Dupont University, the main characters too are essentially archetypes - brilliant but innocent outsider (Charlotte Simmons), frat boy (Hoyt Thorpe), nerd (Adam Gellin), jock (Jo Jo Johanssen), left-wing professor (Jerome Quat). Wolfe has drawn flak from de Groot and other critics for this one-dimensional characterization. For my part, the principals are detailed enough to be believable in the context of the story, which, as a synthesis of the bildungsroman form with the comedy of social manners, is, in any case, more concerned with plot development than character development.
The focus on plot and Wolfe's keen social anthropological eye means that the novel rarely drops in tempo, making turning the page no real effort. Although the various strands of the narrative come together nicely, the ending did feel a little glib, particularly after the sharpness of much of what had come earlier.
Final verdict: Flawed, but still worth reading.
posted by Justin Toland at 10:56 pm
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