Well! Here we disagree, novella.
I have enjoyed all 'late Wolfe' that I've read, viz.
The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities and now
I Am Charlotte Simmons.
On the penultimate page of
I am Charlotte Simmons, he has a character demolishing something "like Samson or the Incredible Hulk." And there you have Wolfe in a nutshell: cramming in the contemporary with the classical, as eager to display his formal erudition in Darwin and Flaubert as his ability to mimic rap lyrics (pretty plausibly, too, for a 75-year-old in a white suit). He just wants to get it all in. And when I said "Wolfe in a nutshell," that was a contradiction in terms: Wolfe doesn't do
in a nutshell. If you said to him, "Less is more," he wouldn't hear you. He wouldn't hear you because he doesn't notice of any expression of a thought that lasts fewer than five sentences. It doesn't blip on his radar.
I am Charlotte Simmons, like
The Right Stuff and
The Bonfire of the Vanities before it (and, I am willing to bet, his second novel
A Man in Full too), is maximalism writ large.
And like
The Right Stuff and
The Bonfire of the Vanities before it, it's very good. The irony of
Bonfire is that, at 700 pages, it's a daunting prospect before you crack it open: I think I had my copy on the bedside table for six months before I gulped and dived. (I had
Charlotte Simmons for three months: now there's progress.) The irony bit being that once you start it, it pulls you along, gripping, funny, accessible and welcoming, far more so than most books half the length. Maybe this is
because of its length, and Wolfe's verbose style makes each sentence do only a quarter the work of a sentence in a shorter, more literary book. Martin Amis said of
A Man in Full (I note in passing that he files his review in
The War Against Cliché in a chapter among other popular fiction, and not among the American greats he so admires):
This book will be a good friend to you. Maybe the best friend you ever had - or so it will sometimes seem. I read A Man in Full during a week of lone travel, and it was always there for me: nestling in my lap on planes and trains, enlivening many a solitary meal, and faithfully waiting in my hotel room when I returned, last thing. Like its predecessor, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe's new novel is fiercely and instantly addictive.
Which is precisely how I felt about
Bonfire, and now about
Charlotte Simmons. Taking just over a week to read - quite a long time for me - it's
always there, and always a welcome prospect instead of whatever else you might be doing. Which is not to say that it's perfect. For me it gets four stars, which would have been four-and-a-half if not for the slowdown in the last few hundred pages, where even by Wolfe's standards, everything takes many many pages to happen.
Charlotte Simmons is an 18-year-old girl heading from the tiny settlement of Sparta, North Carolina (pop. 990, principal industry: Christmas trees) to Dupont University in Pennsylvania, a prestigious seat of learning. Admission to it earns her celebrity in her home town, though Charlotte is not a celebrity kind of person: intelligent and industrious, teetotal and virginal, and ripe for a rude, in all senses, awakening. When she goes to Dupont, she is astonished to find the twin turbines of alcohol and sex everywhere, their smells getting up her nose whichever way she turns. However, she is pretty, with self-professed good legs, and the attention of various seniors who want to get fresh with a freshman soon tip her over, shattering her loneliness but bringing new sadnesses to replace it. She changes, though not into the provocative cover photo of a girl with a crop top, bejewelled belly button and waistband so low you can practically see her fundament.
Nonetheless Wolfe is acutely aware of the 21st century 'uniform' for teenagers of 'winking navels' among girls and prominent 'delts, abs, pecs, traps, lats, bis and tris' among boys. In the hierachies of body, of dress, of athleticism and of cool, Wolfe recognises that the university world is an enclosed social milieu just as sharply defined and snobbish as the yuppie broker belt in
Bonfire of the Vanities. And he peoples it with a full range of characters, if not always as colourful as those in
Bonfire: Jojo Johanssen, the only white basketball player on the university team; Adam Gellin, the geeky student reporter who seems like Charlotte's entry ticket into the life of the mind; Boyt Thorpe, the frat boy who seems like Charlotte's entry into a very different life; and a full complement of gaggling girl and whiney boy students, and their staff.
The overarching and interlinking plots are pretty straightforward, but the appeal is in the telling. Wolfe's dialogue is always a pleasure, and his observational eye never leaves him (no wonder, with all this eye candy for it to feed on). The setting and scenes are no doubt meticulously researched (as is the language of the students: Wolfe notes in the acknowledgements that "students who load up conversations with
likes and
totallys, as in 'like totally awesome,' are almost always females. The totallys now give off such whiffs of parody, they are fading away, even as I write") and the research pays off. Whether the book will be viewed in future generations - as I think Wolfe would like it to be - as a sort of guide to a small corner of the early 21st century, a sort of modern Dickens, is debatable, but since we won't be around then, all that matters is whether it works as a novel for us, now, and to me it does, offering pleasure and leisure in - why not? - equal measure.
