Down from the mountains

Ah, hubris. She has, for the last 40 years, been Tom Wolfe’s main mistress, the subject of most of his fiction and much of his nonfiction too. What happens, he asks, when following your dreams gets you too big for your britches?

It’s a delicate operation, dissecting this question in an intimate, historic and literary manner all at once. How does one write about the “Masters of the Universe” without seeming like a puny, underdressed warrior hurling spears at a stone giant? Does one write from the vantage point of the victims? No, no, no. Any decent reader can hear that whiny tone, even if it’s muffled by a buffed-up narrator. So unbecoming. From the point of view of the conqueror? No one loves an arrogant hero, especially in America. But we don’t seem to derive the Hogarth-print delight of the toothless mob bringing them down, either. No sooner are the mighty fallen than we bustle about resurrecting them (think President Nixon, Donald Trump).

This is why God invented journalists. A journalist is as good as an omniscient narrator any day. Good at piecing the story together from the raw data, at hearing the many voices. You can’t miss him. He’s the guy in the white suit.

Tom Wolfe’s skills as a literary journalist are legendary. This gives him some advantages over the other big boys of his era: Bellow, Updike, Roth and even Mailer. One, he gets out more, frequently into the margins of American life. Two, he listens well. Wolfe’s dialogue is some of the finest in literature, not just fast but deep. He hears the cacophony of our modern lives. It’s one thing to lodge, Joyce-like, in a character’s mind, reporting all the interrupted thoughts and stray tunes and lifelong obsessions. It’s another to plant a satellite dish that picks up cultural riffs as well.

In his new novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” which will be released Nov. 9, the heroine of the title is an 18-year-old super-student from the Blue Ridge Mountains, fresh out of Alleghany High. She’s been awarded a full scholarship to Pennsylvania’s venerable Dupont University, as in Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dupont. “ ‘So you jes remember you come from mountain folks,’ ” her Momma tells her on the day of departure, “ ‘and mountain folks got their faults, but letting theirselves git pushed into doing thangs iddin’ one uv’ m.... All you got to say is, “I’m Charlotte Simmons, and I don’t hold with thangs like ‘at.” And they’ll respect you for that.... I love you, little darling, and your daddy loves you, and no matter whirr you’re at in the whole wide world, you’ll always be our good, good girl.’ ”

Yeah well, nothing has prepared Charlotte, who is cute but a little unctuous, for the big bad world of rap and privilege, for the mean rich girls, for Hoyt and the Saint Rays frat boys or Jojo, the earnest white basketball jock or even Adam, outsider, Jew, dork, journalist for the college paper, the Daily Wave.

Wolfe weaves these lives together until they converge at Dupont around Charlotte Simmons, whose very innocence and uniqueness, not to mention her trim little body and Southern drawl, pulls them into her orbit. We’re supposed to like and admire Charlotte but it gets harder, Madame Bovary-style, as the novel progresses. Even her creator gets sick of her once in a while, throwing in another Southern bit with a brain to trump her in her neurobiology class, or letting her go fetal without much authorial sympathy. “Self discipline was one of the things that had always made Charlotte Simmons ... Charlotte Simmons” she thinks to buck herself up at one point, and it’s not endearing.

And it must be said that there’s a lot more heat in the novel’s locker room scenes than radiates off any of the females, who are either “trolls,” “submissive lab rabbit[s]” or girls tarted up for an evening. The boys may be Neanderthals, but at least they’re alive. The only girl with any redeemable spitfire is Camille, a tiresome feminist on the Daily Wave staff. In one of the funniest scenes, Camille goads an aggressive jock into calling her “slit-eyed,” a racial insult that, like a sexual assault, assures his ruin. “The guy looked as if he had been poleaxed at the base of his skull. He got the picture right away: racial insult. The poisonous skank had him. At Dupont that was worse than homicide. With homicide on your record, you had a fighting chance of staying in school.”

In the opening chapter, Hoyt and his frat buddy Vance, stumbling home late one night, come upon the governor, in town to make Dupont’s commencement address, receiving sexual favors. When a security guy appears from behind a tree and asks what the boys are doing, Hoyt, full of Dupont ego, lobs an obscenity-laced retort and punches the guy out. Months later, Hoyt receives an offer from a well-known investment firm, inspired by a letter from the governor. Starting salary: $95,000.

While Hoyt’s story simmers on one back burner, on another Jojo the jock, inspired by Charlotte, decides to take serious classes, not just the “special” ones taught by professors who are willing to look the other way and keep the jocks’ grades above the necessary Cs. But old habits die hard. Jojo, who has been warned and even punished by his coach for swimming outside the safety net so carefully constructed to keep athletes academically afloat, asks his old student tutor, Adam the journalist, to write a paper for him for his new class. Professor Quat, offending paper in hand, goes straight to the president of Dupont University.

In the scene in which Coach Roth, Professor Quat and President Cutler meet in the president’s office, hung with portraits of various Duponts, Wolfe demonstrates, in its purest form, another quality for which he is both loved and hated by his many readers. His characters are burdened, often to the point of capsizing, by his stereotypes: the insecure jock, the Jew without money, the whining intellectual. An author has to build his characters up from scratch, but so often Wolfe’s seem made from a kit: Cowboys and Indians, Jews and WASPs, Blacks and Whites or Boys and Girls or even Individual vs. Culture. The college campus is the perfect stage for this kind of adolescent, Manichaean chess game.

In a brief note before the prologue, Wolfe describes an experiment in which an assistant professor of psychology finds that when a piece of the brain that controls emotions is removed from a group of cats they succumb to hypermanic sexual arousal, copulating obsessively and randomly with each other. The control group, when released from cages in the same room as the hyper-aroused cats, behaves in the same sexually manic way, to wit: You can take a perfectly innocent, well-brought-up young girl, put her in a stew of immorality, privilege and good old insecurity, and she will come out bad in the end.

In a world of good vs. evil, Charlotte, our sacrificial lamb, has only two choices, and anyway, her sugar daddy never really liked her to begin with. Most of the novel’s other characters make the wrong choices as well. With all that buzz, all that noise, all that flash, how can they have a shot at developing their inner compasses? Charlotte can’t go home again, and she knows it. In Wolfe’s Hobbesian world, she’s just grist for the mill.

*

I Am Charlotte Simmons

A Novel

Tom Wolfe

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 676 pp., $28.95