I Was Charlotte Simmons
Friday night, while Boyfriend was doing some work-related chores, I plowed my way through the final 300 pages of Tom Wolfe's last novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and I have to say I eventually wound up feeling a little disappointed with it. Understand, I'm not saying it wasn't worth reading, but there were a few things that got under my skin a little.
(Warning: If you are planning to read this novel and you don't want any portion of it at all spoiled for you, stop reading my blog now. I'm going to keep this as vague as possible, but by necessity I have to say some things about the plot's resolution. I will try not to ruin it for anybody else who doesn't mind a little bit of spoiling.)
Okay, did you stop reading if you don't want anything given away? Good.
I can see now why everyone mentions this in the same breath as Prep. They do have markedly similar female protagonists from middle-class backgrounds who voluntarily plunge themselves into an elite academic setting and have trouble reconciling that it's not just the best minds, but also the best wallets, who inhabit such places.
If you know my background at all, you know that this is sort of where I come from, too. (My experience in high school was so frighteningly like Prep, in fact, that I spent a good deal of time staring at Curtis Sittenfeld's picture trying to remember if I'd ever spoken to her.) So Charlotte Simmons grew on me immediately - the titular character's cockiness and naivete at the beginning of the book cut a little too close to the bone, if you ask me.
I think it's a credit to Tom Wolfe that I did feel such an emotional attachment to the characters. I found myself watching them on the verge of making stupid decisions, trying not to yell out warnings to them like I do when I'm home alone watching bad horror movies. (I literally did do this when I read the final cockfighting scene in Roots.) And when someone, particularly Charlotte, did something that I knew would have devastating consequences, I got mad at her for being so dumb - until I remembered that at that age, I probably wouldn't have acted differently.
One of Wolfe's main points in the novel is that the desire to develop your intellect can never completely suppress your desire to belong, and belong well. During my early teenage years, I was chunky, brainy, awkward -- an easy target for a certain type of good-looking, athletic pack animal. To be honest, I pursued prep school in part because I wanted to find more people like myself, and find someplace where the things I was good at would be respected and admired more than the things my popular peers were admired for.
Well, as I'm sure you know, you can find people of the popular-cruel sort everywhere, and when I got to boarding school, I was still chunky, brainy, and awkward, and those same folks were still good-looking, athletic, and cruel, they were just a little book-smarter and had more money. And I daresay I got a little more good-looking and athletic after college, and certainly I'm much more personable than I was, and I know now how to deal with people like that (and that nobody is absolutely one or the other). So I read Charlotte Simmons with some mild chagrin - how could she care so much about what these assholes thought of her? How could she let herself be seduced by such an obvious ...frat boy? She was there to get an education, not to fall in with the groups like the ones she shunned in high school! And then I remembered how I was back then - I would have bent over backwards if any of those boys had looked twice at me. I would have been seduced too. So I guess Wolfe kind of nailed it.
What he didn't nail was the ending. Throughout the book, Charlotte has three suitors, and part of the suspense, obviously, is in figuring out which one she finally ends up with. And yes, of course she winds up with one of them - in fact, the one I wanted her to wind up with. But it happened in such a contrived, deus ex machina sort of way, that it left me thoroughly disappointed in the book as well as in Charlotte herself. (Granted, something needed to be done to put an end to the book - by this point it's been 660 pages and no resolution is in sight.)
The final chapter reveals which guy she eventually wound up with by way of revealing others' reactions to her as his girlfriend rather than anything Charlotte herself feels about it. These are not two people who got together because they loved each other, it's two people who like what the other person does for them. Charlotte winds up becoming everything she seemed to hate at the beginning of the book, and she completely loses her identity by getting it caught up in her role to her new boyfriend. It forces the moral to be "popularity is the most important thing" rather than "to thine own self be true." In a way, it's true, I guess (especially when you're 18) but I wish more books would at least pretend it wasn't. At the end of Prep, I felt like Lee got her footing and found herself and realized that there was life beyond teenagerhood. The lesson Charlotte learns is that the right boyfriend will make her popular.
To say nothing for the fact that all three of the men in her life - the dumb jock who yearns to be seen as something other than a dumb jock, the nerdy brainy kid who insinuates himself into the girl's good graces by becoming her best friend, and the incipient alcoholic frat boy who craves only popularity and notches in his bedpost - are fairly one-dimensional. Charlotte herself is only slightly more complicated. Thing is, there are plenty of athletes who get good grades, there are plenty of nerdy brainy kids who treat women like shit, and there are plenty of frat boys who do actually see women as people and not merely as objects. Tom Wolfe does a disservice to anybody who's ever been a jock, a nerd, OR a frat boy in these three characters.
Personally, if I'd been writing the book, aside from trimming at least 100 pages, I'd have had Charlotte's eventual relationship mean something to only her, and possibly the boy she winds up with. I'd show them. I'd give them the chance to fall in love, and let the reader wonder what the campus thought of it, because it really wouldn't matter, ultimately.
Granted, in my own life, it took me about ten years of dating to get to the point where I was only minimally self-conscious about how my relationships mattered in the context of my public image. But if you were writing MY story, rather than Charlotte's, you'd have to go inside my head to do it, because how my love life reflects on my popularity is finally, blessedly, a complete nonfactor. (Ironically, my boyfriend was in a frat.)
(Warning: If you are planning to read this novel and you don't want any portion of it at all spoiled for you, stop reading my blog now. I'm going to keep this as vague as possible, but by necessity I have to say some things about the plot's resolution. I will try not to ruin it for anybody else who doesn't mind a little bit of spoiling.)
Okay, did you stop reading if you don't want anything given away? Good.
I can see now why everyone mentions this in the same breath as Prep. They do have markedly similar female protagonists from middle-class backgrounds who voluntarily plunge themselves into an elite academic setting and have trouble reconciling that it's not just the best minds, but also the best wallets, who inhabit such places.
If you know my background at all, you know that this is sort of where I come from, too. (My experience in high school was so frighteningly like Prep, in fact, that I spent a good deal of time staring at Curtis Sittenfeld's picture trying to remember if I'd ever spoken to her.) So Charlotte Simmons grew on me immediately - the titular character's cockiness and naivete at the beginning of the book cut a little too close to the bone, if you ask me.
I think it's a credit to Tom Wolfe that I did feel such an emotional attachment to the characters. I found myself watching them on the verge of making stupid decisions, trying not to yell out warnings to them like I do when I'm home alone watching bad horror movies. (I literally did do this when I read the final cockfighting scene in Roots.) And when someone, particularly Charlotte, did something that I knew would have devastating consequences, I got mad at her for being so dumb - until I remembered that at that age, I probably wouldn't have acted differently.
One of Wolfe's main points in the novel is that the desire to develop your intellect can never completely suppress your desire to belong, and belong well. During my early teenage years, I was chunky, brainy, awkward -- an easy target for a certain type of good-looking, athletic pack animal. To be honest, I pursued prep school in part because I wanted to find more people like myself, and find someplace where the things I was good at would be respected and admired more than the things my popular peers were admired for.
Well, as I'm sure you know, you can find people of the popular-cruel sort everywhere, and when I got to boarding school, I was still chunky, brainy, and awkward, and those same folks were still good-looking, athletic, and cruel, they were just a little book-smarter and had more money. And I daresay I got a little more good-looking and athletic after college, and certainly I'm much more personable than I was, and I know now how to deal with people like that (and that nobody is absolutely one or the other). So I read Charlotte Simmons with some mild chagrin - how could she care so much about what these assholes thought of her? How could she let herself be seduced by such an obvious ...frat boy? She was there to get an education, not to fall in with the groups like the ones she shunned in high school! And then I remembered how I was back then - I would have bent over backwards if any of those boys had looked twice at me. I would have been seduced too. So I guess Wolfe kind of nailed it.
What he didn't nail was the ending. Throughout the book, Charlotte has three suitors, and part of the suspense, obviously, is in figuring out which one she finally ends up with. And yes, of course she winds up with one of them - in fact, the one I wanted her to wind up with. But it happened in such a contrived, deus ex machina sort of way, that it left me thoroughly disappointed in the book as well as in Charlotte herself. (Granted, something needed to be done to put an end to the book - by this point it's been 660 pages and no resolution is in sight.)
The final chapter reveals which guy she eventually wound up with by way of revealing others' reactions to her as his girlfriend rather than anything Charlotte herself feels about it. These are not two people who got together because they loved each other, it's two people who like what the other person does for them. Charlotte winds up becoming everything she seemed to hate at the beginning of the book, and she completely loses her identity by getting it caught up in her role to her new boyfriend. It forces the moral to be "popularity is the most important thing" rather than "to thine own self be true." In a way, it's true, I guess (especially when you're 18) but I wish more books would at least pretend it wasn't. At the end of Prep, I felt like Lee got her footing and found herself and realized that there was life beyond teenagerhood. The lesson Charlotte learns is that the right boyfriend will make her popular.
To say nothing for the fact that all three of the men in her life - the dumb jock who yearns to be seen as something other than a dumb jock, the nerdy brainy kid who insinuates himself into the girl's good graces by becoming her best friend, and the incipient alcoholic frat boy who craves only popularity and notches in his bedpost - are fairly one-dimensional. Charlotte herself is only slightly more complicated. Thing is, there are plenty of athletes who get good grades, there are plenty of nerdy brainy kids who treat women like shit, and there are plenty of frat boys who do actually see women as people and not merely as objects. Tom Wolfe does a disservice to anybody who's ever been a jock, a nerd, OR a frat boy in these three characters.
Personally, if I'd been writing the book, aside from trimming at least 100 pages, I'd have had Charlotte's eventual relationship mean something to only her, and possibly the boy she winds up with. I'd show them. I'd give them the chance to fall in love, and let the reader wonder what the campus thought of it, because it really wouldn't matter, ultimately.
Granted, in my own life, it took me about ten years of dating to get to the point where I was only minimally self-conscious about how my relationships mattered in the context of my public image. But if you were writing MY story, rather than Charlotte's, you'd have to go inside my head to do it, because how my love life reflects on my popularity is finally, blessedly, a complete nonfactor. (Ironically, my boyfriend was in a frat.)
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