I Am Charlotte Simmons
Author: Tom Wolfe
Rating: ā 2/5
Date Read: 2013/06/30
Pages: 676
I Am Charlotte Simmons was published in 2004, which was the year in which I matriculated at my alma mater. I guess that makes Charlotte and I the same age (except that Charlotte is, obviously, a shadowy, fictional stereotype of someone my age and, thus, not real). Charlotte Simmons is a sheltered, smart girl from a small town in the mountains of North Carolina, who ends up at a top university and is shocked by what she sees there. I was also a sheltered smart girl from a small town in the mountains (of Southern California. In case you were unaware, California is also overrun with idiotic Republican whack job Jesus freaks, at least once you get away from the coast and into the shit-hole provincial towns. Theyāre probably spouting nonsense about the glories of gun-ownership via semi-literate Facebook posts as we speak).
All this is to say that Charlotte and I are both girls from small towns who got into prestigious universities, only to find that they didnāt fit the Elysian vision of intellectual nirvana we had created for ourselves when we imagined what college would be like. The main difference between us is that, while I was disappointed, I didnāt find this particularly surprising.
But wait, you may say, itās unfair for you, as a reader, to hate on a book because it doesnāt mirror your own experiences! And this is true, to a point, except that Wolfe wrote a book rife with inaccuracies about what life was like for college students in 2004. This paragraph serves as a running inventory of specific things Tom Wolfe got wrong: Charlotteās roommate brings a fax machine with her, and sets it up in her dorm room (??). Wolfe describes cell phones as if theyāre super fancy gadgets possessed only by the elite. A fraternity brother asks to borrow porn videos from the other brothers, instead of searching for porn on the internet like a normal human being. Wolfe forgets that weāre a bit too young for Animal House and Swingers to be the defining films our youth (although he is correct in assuming that we all watched Old School). Iām pretty sure weāre not the first generation to forgo last names when introducing ourselves. Rap and reggae were not the only genres people listened to (I mean, isnāt Belle and Sebastain one of the prototypical college bands? Also, reggae has always been pretty niche). Britney Spears peaked when Oopsā¦I did it Again came out in 2000. The Stairmaster may have been big in 80ās, but young women have been partial to the elliptical since at least the early 2000ās. No cool girl would willingly call herself a ādoucheā (or a trekkie, for that matter).
To be fair, Wolfe got a few things right. Often, my classmates would proffer answers in class that were so idiotic, I couldnāt help but wonder how they had gotten into the university in the first place. Athletes really are treated like gods, even at schools with fairly middling athletic programs. Also, we played a ton of drinking games.
Nevertheless, the millennial cultural narrative doesnāt align with Wolfeās story of an edenic fall into a tawdry, quasi-intellectual underbelly populated by hormone-crazed sex drones. In reality, we went to college, like our parents before us, we studied, we graduated, we attempted to obtain gainful employment. Things would be a lot easier if previous generations hadnāt managed to screw up both the economy and the environment, but thatās a different story. With Charlotte Simmons, it seems to me that Tom is not so much a prescient social commentator as he is a self-indulgent writer who cried wolf.
The main problem with I Am Charlotte Simmons is that that Wolfe fails to satirize the (very real) issues of entitlement and lack of racial and economic diversity on prestigious college campuses. Instead, he adds his voice to the cyclical, and ultimately untenable, diatribe against ākids these days,ā forgetting that weāve been there before, and the overhyped prognostications about the end of polite society have consistently proved to be, shockingly, anticlimactic.
Two stars: one, because the writing is remarkable (this is Tom Wolfe, after all. Dude knows how to write). Two, because thereās a great description of the horror that is the fast-casual dining experience.