Tom Wolfe: I Am Charlotte Simmons

A lot depends on Charlotte Simmons in Tom Wolfe's sprawling, brawling, rutting depiction of American campus life.

A lot depends on what you end up thinking about his heroine, a scholarship girl, a virgin hick from Sparta, North Carolina who has somehow never seen a Cosmopolitan magazine ("suppose somebody ... saw her reading this ... blatant pornography!"), never had a drink or a pair of designer jeans. All Charlotte Simmons really knows, apart from the fact that sex and drink are bad, is that she is intellectually superior.

She soon finds out that she is inferior in any way that counts at the Ivy League Dupont University where Wolfe-men in the making, future Masters of the Universe, go to learn how to behave in the world by learning how to behave in the frat house.

Here is Hoyt, a hero on campus for his good looks, his ability to bed a girl in seven minutes without ever learning her name. Hoyt stands up to a bodyguard of the Governor of California after witnessing the politician receiving a sexual favour from a college girl. This has nothing to do with outrage over the girl's honour. It has everything to do with "not taking crap from an impudent simian from the lower orders".

That's the Saint Ray way. "A fraternity like Saint Ray, if you truly understood it, forged you into a man who stood apart from the ordinary run of passive, compliant American college boys. Saint Ray was a MasterCard that gave you carte blanche to assert yourself — he loved that metaphor. Of course, you couldn't go through life like a frat boy, breaking rules just for the fun of it. The frat-boy stuff was sort of like basic training."

For Charlotte Simmons basic training has included being a good girl, loving her parents and believing that she is destined to do great things. At Dupont she shares a room with "a girl so tall and thin that Charlotte thought she must be a model from a magazine!" This is Beverly who "sexiles" Charlotte from their room so that she can have sex with lacrosse players, or anyone else she takes a fancy to. Beverly is a rich bitch who thinks Charlotte is a goody two shoes, and says so.

The trouble is, Charlotte Simmons is a goody two shoes, she's a prude and a bore and she has no conversation. She wears a plaid dressing gown and "snuggy" slippers to the co-ed bathroom.

She is sure of her intellectual superiority, of her brilliance. So that when Wolfe sends her off, having set her on a collision course with Hoyt, in a scarlet mini dress (Charlotte, although she knows this is sinful, is very proud of her legs) and high heels, when she gets drunk and Hoyt takes advantage — "I had to blow the dust off her" — it is hard to really care.

It's hard to believe in Charlotte: Where did she come from? Another planet? And horrible as it is to witness her now complete humiliation (as Hoyt tells everyone, in Sparta they don't go in for trends in pubic hair grooming. "Like Astroturf," he sneers), Charlotte's exploitation of the geeky, but loyal, Adam to help her get over this humiliation sets her up as user too.

Wolfe, at his worst is as pompous as the professors he caricatures. I think we know how f**k patois and s**t patois are used without longer than dictionary length demonstrations. I think we already knew that hot can mean cool, as in: "hot being the comparative degree of cool in teenage grammar".

And he does bang on about "Sex! Sex! It was in the air along with the nitrogen and the oxygen! The whole campus was lumid with it! tumid with it! lubricated with it! gorged with it! tingling with it! In a state of around-the-clock arousal with it! Rutrutrutrutrutrutrutrut." On Wolfe's campus loins, are "oh loamy, loamy loins!" loins are "on the qui vive".

For all that, and for all the frustrations of Charlotte (hers, and ours) Wolfe's novel does ratatatat along: it is immensely readable. You read it, or continue reading it, for the frat house scenes, the sports jocks, the "fresh meat" bitches, the journalistic observations of American college life.

But Charlotte Simmons feels observed. It is an old-fashioned boarding school story, updated but not fresh.

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald writer

Published by: Jonathan Cape
Price: $59.95