I Am Not Charlotte Simmons

I am in the process of reading Tom Wolfe's new novel I Am Charlotte Simmons about the degradations of college life ca. 2000. I wish I could say I am enjoying it, because he's relatively conservative (for a novelist), but I'm not. It reads like a cartoon version of a sociological essay --almost like those 1930s Marxist novels about the working class. I don't believe in the reality of the characters, and nothing they do has surprised me yet -- the great flaw in any novel. Nor do I even believe in his point as sociology -- yes, some young people may be vulgar, yes, rap is vulgar, yes, the emphasis on athletics at universities is overwrought, yes, young people may have too much sex too soon, yes, many colleges, even elite colleges, have "dumbed down" their liberal arts course offerings. But there are also young people who went in droves to see the Pope when he came to America, there are young people who listen to Christian music, or play classical music themselves, there are athletes who are well-rounded people (and the number who play "big time" colleges sports like basketball and football at big-time universities is dwarfed by the number who play sports like soccer and lacrosse and field hockey and tennis and swimming, etc., and the number who play sports at smaller colleges), and there are young people who aren't having sex all the time. The part of the novel that makes the point that literary culture ain't what it used to be... well, all right, I agree. Movies and television have usurped the novel as cultural touchstones, sure. But maybe that's why we have supposedly "great" novelists like Wolfe who can't hold a candle to the "middlebrow" authors of the 1950s like John Marquand, James Gould Cozzens, or John O'Hara. Read Cozzens' By Love Possessed after you read I Am Charlotte Simmons to see what has happened to the novel... it's like you suddenly are picking up a work of juvenile fiction.

I hate to agree with Michiko Kakutani about anything, but she's right in her NY Times review: it's "a novel that feels as if its author were merely going through the motions."

Ah, well, I'll probaby finish it. Then I'll go back to reading Ron Chernow's great biography of John D. Rockefeller, Titan. Query: why are contemporary biographers so good (see, e.g., Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex, David McCullough's John Adams, or Chernow's recent Alexander Hamilton), while contemporary novelists are so dreadful?