Sex and the kitty

The prologue to Tom Wolfe’s new novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” is the sort of mildly dirty joke you could probably tell your tablemates at a black-tie dinner. It’s a story about a lab experiment in which a psychology professor removes the amygdala (“an almond-shaped mass of gray matter deep within the brain that controls emotions in the higher mammals”) from 30 cats, which drives them into a frenzy of sexual hyperactivity. When one of the cats develops a passionate erotic interest in a scientist’s shoe, an assistant points out that the besotted animal is a member of the control group. From this the principal researcher concludes that immersion in a “social or ‘cultural’ atmosphere” can “overwhelm the genetically determined responses of perfectly normal, healthy animals.”

Intuiting that Wolfe’s 676-page novel will not be about cat psychology, we assume we are meant to draw some parallel between these feline Don Juans and our own species. Well, sure. We’re in Tom Wolfe territory, a world in which civilized men and women, given the slightest provocation, will revert to behavior that would make our Neanderthal ancestors blush. We prepare ourselves for a highly enjoyable, absorbing ride past a series of human train wrecks whose crashing and burning will expose what lies directly beneath the thin veneer under which we’ve learned to hide our barbaric instincts regarding sex and aggression.

Only the most dully literal-minded readers may find themselves puzzling over something that anyone who has ever opened a tin of cat food has at some point wondered: Do we have all that much in common with dear old Whiskers and Tabby? Is it possible to theorize about our social mores by observing the sex addiction of amygdalectomized felines?

The cat story’s a joke, I understand. I mention it only to suggest the reasons why it functions as such a good introduction to the novel -- and to the somewhat bifurcating experience of being thoroughly engrossed and entertained even as we are distracted by doubts about the plausibility of much of what we are reading.

Tom Wolfe is one of the many writers who began their careers as journalists and later employed their reportorial skills in their novels and short stories. As a pioneering practitioner of the so-called New Journalism, Wolfe blurred the boundary between truth and invention and then crossed it into fiction, bringing with him the preoccupations and talents he’d displayed in his reportage.

What has always been most exciting about his work is his sheer narrative energy, range and ambition, the delight he takes in telling a story, his simultaneously excessive and precise use of language, his eye for the telling detail. In his journalism and two previous novels, he has displayed a lively interest in closed social systems and in the power relations within subcultures that deludedly consider themselves egalitarian or at least meritocratic.

Here the closed system is an elite Pennsylvania university named Dupont, at which the starry-eyed heroine arrives as a freshman and soon meets the novel’s main characters: Hoyt Thorpe, a loutish fraternity member; Adam Gellin, a brainy nerd; and Jojo Johanssen, a supersized basketball player who fears that his star may be on the wane. Through their eyes, we rapidly grasp what the Candide-like Charlotte will take hundreds of pages to realize: that the school she so reveres is a fetid den populated by privileged, beer-swilling, eating-disordered, sex-addled, amygdalectomized cats.

Much of it is a lot of fun, and there are, along the way, hilarious scenes. No one writes more laceratingly about social discomfort and entitlement, about status consciousness, pretension, chicanery and phoniness, and about how unattractive snobbery and condescension look from the outside. But even before Charlotte has been “sexiled” -- forced to give up her room so that her bulimic, snobbish slut of a roommate can spend the night with a boyfriend -- we become conscious of the drawbacks of one sort of journalistic approach to fiction.

Mostly to his credit, Wolfe has had an obsession with getting things right, with locating the surface detail, the exact figure of speech that nails a particular character or milieu. No one who has read “Bonfire of the Vanities” can ever again look at certain society women without thinking of Wolfe’s terms for them: social X-rays and lemon tarts. But here, the need to find that razor-sharp locution seems to have occasioned a nervousness about getting things wrong that is palpable even in the dedication to “my two collegians,” Wolfe’s children, who “rescued me when I got in over my head trying to use current slang.”

Despite whatever help these experts may have provided, we begin to feel uneasy. For starters, there’s Charlotte’s hometown, not merely in the boondocks but on some parallel universe beyond the broadcast range of MTV or any source of information that might have given this otherwise observant, intellectually curious girl a rudimentary anthropological acquaintance with the culture of her own generation. Consequently, she arrives at Dupont having read Flaubert in the original but unable to decipher the most crudely obvious references to drugs and sex.

Meanwhile, the reader is having troubles of her own, trying to figure out what sort of place Dupont University is. It’s supposedly on an academic par with Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Yet it seems more like one of those state colleges whose diligent students must work twice as hard after graduation to overcome their alma mater’s reputation as a party school. You wonder how an entire population of high school successes who got into Dupont could have lost their minds and their motivation during freshman orientation and lack all ambition other than to emerge from a four-year bender with a job in investment banking. Do female students at an elite university really feel their hearts skip a beat when a swaggering frat boy tells them they look like Britney Spears?

Throughout, you can feel the writer’s anxiety manifesting itself in an almost Tourette’s-like inability to refrain from explaining the jokes (such as one involving a coach’s belief that “mens sana in corpore sano” is a phrase from the Greek) to the reader who might not otherwise get them. Perhaps Wolfe is sensibly worried that his public might have gone to Dupont U. But the more troubling problem with the need to get things right is the way in which this drive can limit an artist’s willingness to take certain risks and plumb the complexities of personality and human nature.

Characters in fiction, as in life, act in ways that are alternately predictable and surprising, at once contradicting themselves and our assumptions about them until they rise off the page as fully individualized human beings. But a writer overly concerned with getting things right may be more inclined to make his characters fit our expectations about what a certain “type” of person will do in any given situation.

So, in the novel, each account of a character’s history serves less to make us know him more intimately than to place and categorize him; it acts as a sort of a set-up with a punch line that will pay off later in the plot. The recital of frat-boy Hoyt’s early lessons in physical self-defense prepares us for the moment when he rescues Charlotte from two lacrosse-playing brutes. The insecurities of Adam’s upbringing erupt, even less nobly, in a cringing conversation with a professor who holds the student’s fate in his hands.

Of course, to remark that Wolfe’s characters seem a bit broad and cartoonish is rather like complaining that Balzac’s characters seem preoccupied with money. But too many false notes and nagging questions of authenticity can pull us out from the novel just when we are most engrossed.

It’s a pity, because Wolfe is clearly after something more serious than energized light entertainment. He has noticed that smart young women often suffer for their intelligence, and that sex, beauty and confidence nearly always trump brains, high-mindedness and decency. He’s talking, I assume, about the radical decline in our educational system, the pressures to dumb down that dim brilliant Charlotte into the equivalent of a control-group cat attempting to copulate with a piece of shoe leather.

The ultimate irony is that Dupont University begins to seem like the perfect college for the ideal reader of “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” Its graduates would know precisely how to respond to the book’s strengths and shortcomings. They’d enjoy themselves. They’d laugh at the jokes, whether they got them or not. They wouldn’t demand the subtler nuances we want from literature, nor would they ask any questions about what the novel offers us besides a good time, and why a good time doesn’t quite seem like enough from someone who observes our culture so sharply as Tom Wolfe. *