Tom Wolfe in the groves of academe:

Tom Wolfe and I are about the same age. While he attended St. Christopher’s private prep school in Richmond, I was in a public school in New York. When he entered Washington and Lee, I entered a small university in New Jersey. When he got a Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale, I got a Ph. D. in Comparative Religion at Northwestern. He went on to invest his life as a journalist and writer championing the “New Journalism,” the “novelist as reporter,” and I invested mine in the university campus, teaching the world’s religions to undergraduates. I now live in the city where he began, and he lives not far from the town where I began.
Tom Wolfe’s new novel, “I am Charlotte Simmons,” describes student life at a contemporary university, and so he entered the domain where I have spent my last forty years. That sounds to me like an invitation to critique the research he did as a novelist-reporter at Stanford, Chapel Hill, the University of Florida and numerous other centers of higher learning. My Virginia Commonwealth University is not his “elite Dupont University,” but I have spent time at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other “elite” institutions, and so perhaps qualify as an informed critic.
First, I admire the courage of a reporter taking in the complex world of the modern university. Even more, I value his courage in attempting to see it through the life of a freshman, especially a bright “little slip of a girl” from the mountains of North Carolina. We have had successful novels told through the voices of prep schoolers: “A Separate Peace,” “The Catcher in the Rye.” We have also had novels on the musings and machinations of professors, from Willa Cather’s “The Professor’s House” to Mary McCarthy’s “The Groves of Academe,” to stack of novels by Philip Roth. Recently mysteries on campus have made their mark, “The Rule of Four” or Donna Tartt’s “The Secret Society.” But Tom Wolfe’s ambitions take us into the world of campus social class and its signals, the arcane vocabularies of basketball demi-gods, fraternity drinkers and sexual predators, gay rights advocates, the classrooms of Nobel Laureates, and the offices of millionaire coaches and beleaguered presidents. He catalogues the clothing, concerns, and languages nuances of each, and explains unfamiliar words and practices, as though he were our guide on a visit to some exotic tribe. If Wolfe seems overly didactic, that after all, is an essential feature of his “journalistic novel.”
Now to my objections to the novel: my view is that Wolfe analyzes the student body, but allows the student soul to escape. Wolfe’s dissertation on the anatomy of the university focuses on the loins, a favorite word he repeats with dozens of adjectives attached, but he barely hears the heartbeat of the university. Were alcohol, sex, violence, and vituperation to be removed from the lives of DuPont’s students, there would be less than a shadow of meaning remaining according to Wolfe’s reporting.
I am not faulting the novel for its Rabelaisian sense of the grotesque and carnivalesque in university costume. Such startling excesses are present in some places high and low on every campus I have known. But Wolfe finds do little of the compassion I find in students, so few of the deep friendships I see growing from the first day of each semester, so little of dedicated asceticism among many who give up so much to solve a problem, research an issue, prepare for a profession, or finish a project that is exciting and vital.
Most unbelievable to me is the isolation Charlotte finds herself in at DuPont: no one she can confide in, no soul mates, no compassionate community. The reality is that from day one freshman are invited to join communities of all sizes and shapes on campus. They find friends in a small freshman seminar, they take a service-learning course that calls for working with the community, they join “Food not Bombs,” participate in a choir, discover new facets of music and art. Even more unbelievable is that Charlotte brings “Christ’s Evangelic creed” from the North Carolina mountains to DuPont, but never finds or is found by the chapel, chaplain and religious organizations that are among the most visible and active communities on any campus today. Every university beats to the rhythm of religious prayer groups, scripture study cells, interfaith councils and religious clubs sponsoring blood-drives, tutoring in nearby public schools, or working with boys and girls clubs. Would the “devout” Charlotte Simmons avoid such opportunities, or fail to attend a church or chapel with its own youth and young adult organizations? Wolfe becomes unbelievable here.
Wolfe, rather, has the innocent Charlotte enticed and then trapped by a world defined by alcohol, sexual exploitation, violence and accompanying social conventions, the very things Wolfe enjoys describing in detail. By the novel’s close, Charlotte has found her niche in that world and found safety and acceptance as the “girlfriend” and tutor to a campus “superstar.”
A novelist can certainly choose to chronicle disillusionment, failure and compromise in a character’s coming of age on campus. But perhaps what Wolfe has unwittingly demonstrated is the temptations faced by the journalist-novelist, and the likelihood of failure. Wolfe may give the impression that he seeks the truth regarding DuPont University, but in fact he needs to attract an audience, to win a market. That market, he believes, is far more likely to want a story of young bodies with “throbbing loins,” addicted to drinking games, mesmerized by athlete heroes and violence, and intent on serial sexual exploitation, than a deeper exploration of the diversity of goals of university students. Those many rich layers of campus life, youthful devotion, sacrifice and hard work seem to have faded before the need to push commodities that meet the popular market’s appetites. The pity is that the revealing of these deeper reaches of the soul of students would have made the story of Charlotte Simmons far more poignant than “I Am Charlotte Simmons” allows.

Cliff Edwards is a professor of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.