I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Brief Review, 12-Years Late
The cover of the version I read.
Yesterday I finished Tom Wolfe’s *I Am Charlotte Simmons* (2004). I had wanted to read it upon publication, but it appeared in the midst of dissertation research and writing. Then I forgot about it. A few months ago, however, it came up in conversation with a workmate. She had a copy and let me borrow it.
The book conveys four story lines of interest at the fictional Dupont University in Pennsylvania. The story lines occur in the form of four characters: Charlotte, Hoyt, JoJo, and Adam.
None of the four characters are particularly likeable, but one might find one or more interesting by way of a student type, circa the 2000-2004 period, each represents. At the center is Charlotte Simmons. She is a first generation, wide-eyed college girl—poor by way of means, but exceptional for her self-awareness, good looks, and raw intelligence. Hoyt is the hot, preening frat boy, always read to sell-out a situation to get laid. JoJo is a frustrated but generally well-meaning athlete—a star basketball player at Dupont U. The average-looking Adam is a desperate wannabe intellectual and student journalist. His insecurities, anger, and ambition are always on the verge of undercutting his larger more admirable traits.
My thoughts?
The novel is way too long. This is most likely a feature and not a bug for Wolfe fans. At 738 pages, it was inevitable that the story would plod along at points. Wolfe’s ear for dialogue helps one persevere when the story is just average. The incessant adolescence on display, from all four characters, made the story tedious for this reader. Perhaps this too is a feature that speaks to Wolfe’s genius—his ability to inhabit a mindset. That tediousness is underscored by the seeming improbability of the occasional high intellectual engagements of its precocious actors, especially Charlotte (as a freshman) and Adam (who I think is a junior). But perhaps I should’ve judge the potential for highs based on my own slow unfolding as a thinker at college.
Through these characters-as-types, Wolfe, I think, attempts to analyze the following issues in higher education: first-generation students, gender, Greek life, athletics, student journalism, and campus politics.
Wolfe has some successes in each area, particularly in relation to big money, high-profile athletics. The coach of the basketball team, Buster Roth, is a memorable character. Wolfe successfully narrates the corrupting influence of money in relation to both the sport itself and its relationship to university life. All but Hoyt’s character become enmeshed in the problems of big money athletics, right down to the improbable ending involving Charlotte.
But I think Wolfe is most successful in exploring the problems of gender on campus: from hyper-femininity to hyper-masculinity, and everything in-between. Some of the most explosive parts of the book involve sexual tension and expression, especially in relation to Charlotte.
My recommendation? With regrets to Mr. Wolfe, and despite my love for long books, don’t read this unless your a junkie for books about campus life, or super interested in narratives of gender and sexual expression in the context of prolonged adolescence. Otherwise it’s too long and tedious.
Your thoughts? Am I off-base? – TL
Thinking Through History 
I didn’t love the book — but it does anticipate a conversation about sexual assault on campus that will happen in the next decade. Really the turning point in Hoyt raping Charlotte. It’s the moment when she shifts from believing anything is possiblel, to realizing that gender and class will define her university experience. At the end, what is significant is that she has tied her fate to another damaged, exploited person — who will protect her physically and socially, in exchange for her being the ballast that keeps him eligible for the team and psychically grounded on a racist campus. In the end, both Jojo and Charlotte are, in a sense, working for the university.
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You’re right that Wolfe’s attempt to narrate “consent” is, well, exemplary of the problems that surround that topic, assault, and rape. Charlotte is clearly saying no and yes and the beginning of that scene, with no being the clear ultimate answer—while Hoyt rapes under the structured and manipulated haze of alcohol and hormones. I think you’re right about the ending. Both are “working” for the university, with both being damaged and exploited.
Given your comment, I probably should’ve added “power” as a deep current in the book—how it is learned, obtained, and kept on campus. This topic should be obvious, as the “I am Charlotte Simmons” mantra is about empowerment, both real and desired. – TL
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Another criticism: Race is treated superfluously, in almost racist terms. I’m not saying necessarily that Wolfe himself has no understanding of these topics (race on campus, race in college athletics). But if his characters in any way reflect his own subject position, then the treatment is radically inadequate at best. – TL
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Charlotte Simmons is about class in America. Tom Wolfe wrote that book from inside my head and how ingenious he must be to understand what it’s like to come from poverty, academically, gifted, receive a an inferior education and find yourself in a university in which you know for certain that you are not as good as everyone else, that you do not have the right clothes That you are the object of cruelty in its worst form, people who do it just for the fun of it, and in order to make them feel better about themselves.
Imagine attending the eighth worst school in a state consistently ranked in the bottom 3 states Imagine attending the eighth worst school in a state consistently ranked in the bottom 34 public schools for quality education, where your senior year is spent, teaching three classmates how to read so they can be given a diploma where the last math you receive is eighth grade. Imagine that there is no advanced biology, chemistry, calculus, and in fact, you are never taught algebra. Imagine that one of your classmates do not bathe or change clothes more than once a month and that your elementary school teachers confuse homonyms and misspell them such as cents for sense. Imagine a classroom in which you merely want to be left alone, you read the textbook in the first two weeks of school, and that is the end of your study for the year. Although you are not pretty, you are not overly unattractive you play sports you do your work you are quiet and you try to make friends, but you are bullied from first grade until you graduate because you are different. You have no friends and no connections and no relatives or advisors who can give you information about what it’s like to practice law or which schools are good or how to prepare for standardized tests.
Though the worst is social self-conscious The knowledge that you are not good enough to be included in any of the organizations at college, for a variety of reasons such as, not being in a sorority or not having the right clothes.
No matter what academic accomplishments, I achieved, such as taking 22 hours of semester and graduating in three years, obtaining an a in organic and in organic chemistry without any mathematical preparation, struggling to make it through the week with one can of chicken for the weekend.
After graduating, on a Lark, I applied to Law School, and by the grace of God or fate I shocked everyone including myself by ending up ranked number three out of 217 students at the end of the first semester. Everything changed. I went from socially unacceptable rockstar. I was offered a clerkship, making what I considered to be the richest I’ve ever felt, Even my own father side to change his dictatorial tack.
The entire project of my life changed. And don’t let anyone ever tell you that this is not the best sweetest thing that ever happened to poor girl from a rural place. And it is the hardest thing I have ever done. Charlotte Simmons is a very mild depiction of just how painful and difficult the journey can be.
The book is something you should read in order to understand how difficult it is to move up when you are not equipped with anything except and mind, you are willing to sacrifice and use your utmost efforts to overcome the criminally, deficient prepatory education. Charlotte!! had a very good preparatory education compared to my own.
This should be required reading for the teachers union, and all of the people who don’t want to allow special schools for people who are ambitious and have academic abilities. More importantly, I suffered and still suffer 50 years later because I was not around my own kind and could not make friends. I was different. Be different and be damned.
I am Charlotte Simmons. Being inspired.
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Tried to edit sorry for typos.
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Isabel: Thanks for the long comment. I appreciate what you’re saying about class (self-consciousness, material disadvantages, deficits, etc.). And of course we take the good and bad together when one of these kinds of students is able to progress further. Kudos to you, Isabel, for your growth, successes, and flourishing in spite of the negatives. – TL
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