Book Review: I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe (2004)

Paperback cover of I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe, 2004. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Author photo of Tom Wolfe taken for I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Dude, didja see her? Bra, check her out! She’s smokin’ hot, man! WAZZZZUPPPP, my bros! As the sounds of inane conversation filter above the bass thumping and pounding, you notice him. He looks, well, old. Arteriosclerotic. A fossil, for sure. Why is he here? He must be a narc. One of the deans, maybe? And what’s he wearing? A suit? Who wears a suit when you’re trying to be a narc? Not only that, it’s a white suit. Didn’t he get the memo, the black light party was LAST weekend. Huh. Definitely some kind of narc. He’s not trying to fit in and dance to the music the way the other narcs do, using dated college slang from the 1980’s. He’s not trying to mack on the hotties, either. He seems impervious to their loamy loins, although he might be too old to notice—he’s not in the season of the rising sap anymore! He’s just standing there, holding a hulking green notebook in his hands, scribbling down something. It’s so dark in here, how can he even see what he’s writing down? Super weird. 

In Tom Wolfe’s third novel, 2004’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe presents the reader with a very detailed picture of Charlotte Simmons’ first semester at the fictional Dupont University. Dupont is a well-regarded academic institution that also wins national championships in basketball. Wolfe said of Dupont that it was based on “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, and a few other places all rolled into one.” (Quoted in the Yale Alumni magazine.)

Charlotte Simmons is a brilliant young woman who graduated valedictorian from Sparta High School in Sparta, North Carolina, a small town in the northwest corner of the state. Charlotte has her sights set on getting out of Sparta, and she gets a scholarship to attend Dupont, the college of her dreams. 

But Charlotte has a rude awakening in store for her when she gets to Dupont. Charlotte is disappointed to discover that a lot of the focus at Dupont is on frat parties and drinking, and not so much on “the life of the mind,” as she had hoped. Her roommate, Beverly, is a shallow rich girl who is only concerned with Charlotte when she needs the dorm room for a tryst. 

I Am Charlotte Simmons also follows “Jojo” Johanssen, the only white starting player on the Dupont basketball team. Through Johanssen’s story arc, Wolfe offers a sharp critique of college athletic programs that treat their players as prized ponies, giving them preferential treatment at every turn, and keeping them isolated from the rest of the undergraduates. Through an encounter with Charlotte, Jojo suddenly, and perhaps somewhat improbably, seeks to take more challenging classes, much to the chagrin of his basketball coach. 

Jojo has an academic tutor to help him pass his classes, Adam Gellin. Adam is a smart, hard-working student who also delivers pizzas in his spare time. Adam meets Charlotte, and in addition to being struck by her beauty, he finds someone who is also searching for something more from the college experience than a round of parties. 

Another major character is the douchebag frat boy Hoyt Thorpe. Like all the other males in the novel, Hoyt encounters Charlotte and finds her very beautiful. As a senior, Hoyt has anxiety about his future, as his academic transcript is less than stellar. 

One of the most outstanding parts of the book is the novella-length section that recounts Charlotte’s overnight trip as Hoyt’s date to his fraternity formal in Washington, DC. The whole trip is a disaster from the beginning, as Charlotte suffers through an awkward car ride with juniors and seniors that she doesn’t know. The other girls mock Charlotte’s Southern accent, and she feels very isolated. When the group checks into the hotel, Charlotte is surprised that she doesn’t have her own hotel room, and instead will have to share a room with Hoyt and another couple. Charlotte gets very drunk during the formal, and as night turns into morning, Hoyt has sex with her. Charlotte is a virgin and bleeds on the bedsheets, disgusting Hoyt. Charlotte is impaired from her drinking, and her consent is hazy at best. Throughout these painful chapters, you’re hoping that somehow Charlotte will extricate herself from this awful situation and that the evening won’t turn out the way you fear it will. When Charlotte returns to campus, the story of her losing her virginity quickly makes the rounds of Dupont, and she finds herself socially ostracized. 

Michiko Kakutani called the novel’s sex scenes “gross” and “leering” in her New York Times review, but it’s clear the scene is supposed to be extremely uncomfortable. There’s nothing erotic or sexy about it. When Wolfe was interviewed on NPR about the sex scenes, he said, “I wanted these scenes to be as impersonal as, in fact, they are.” 

On a lighter note, there are several in jokes in I Am Charlotte Simmons for Tom Wolfe fans to enjoy. Hoyt Thorpe is pursued by the bond firm Pierce & Pierce, which is the company that Sherman McCoy worked for in The Bonfire of the Vanities. The law firm of Dunning, Sponget, and Leach, first introduced in Bonfire, makes an appearance towards the end of the novel. Streptolon, Wolfe’s favorite fictional synthetic material, first introduced in his writing in the late 1960’s and name-checked in nearly all of his books, appears here as warm-up pants and the webbing for a deck chair. As usual, people are packed “shank to flank,” numerous young women have “loamy loins,” and many young men are going through “the season of the rising sap.” Wolfe also briefly references one of his favorite novels, James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, a masterpiece of the kind of detailed, naturalistic fiction that Wolfe favored. 

Wolfe nails the details of his characters, from Charlotte’s occasional upspeak, to Adam’s desire to show off his knowledge, to Jojo’s insecurity when a hotshot African American player threatens his role as a starter. Wolfe was a master of the neuroses of the male psyche, as he saw with sharp clarity how males present themselves in society in order to establish their places in the status hierarchy. 

Wolfe gives all his characters vivid, detailed backstories, showing us how they have journeyed to this point in their lives, and how things like class, status, and money have formed them. Wolfe’s attention to details helps him create a vibrant picture of college life at the turn of the millennium. 

I Am Charlotte Simmons was savaged by reviewers when it was released in the fall of 2004. Many critics complained about Wolfe trying to create credible characters that were fifty years younger than he was. However, as someone who went to college during the time that Wolfe was writing the novel, I found it to be a very accurate depiction of college life, even though the college I attended was very different from Dupont University. I think it’s a major achievement of Wolfe’s that he was able to create vibrant characters that were fifty years younger than he was. If you want to know what college was like in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, read I Am Charlotte Simmons.