Hubris 101

I Am Charlotte Simmons

Tom Wolfe

2004

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      Tom Wolfe’s insight to the broiling ideological diseases plaguing America has made him one of the more important authors in recent history. In his penultimate nonfiction novel, he tackles an environment I was privy to: Naughts-era college life. Many of the spoiled fratboy and outcast habits are present in a way that takes me back. 

      The book revolves around Charlotte Simmons, a working-class student whose grades were good enough to justify a scholarship to a prestigious Ivy League school called Dupont. However, I question the necessity of making this an Ivy League school, and it may be the one point in which the commentary falls flat. Presumably it was so that Wolfe can emphasize the elite, privileged nature of this college while entertaining the premise that its sports programs are profitable. From what I hear, Ivy League schools are comparably pathetic in that department because they don’t compromise on the scholar-athlete principle. The story would work just as well at a state school, which would definitely have its share of rich kids. The one interesting thing this decision adds is that it reinforces the theme of hypocritical pretension by mentioning that Dupont prides itself on not “selling out” by having an anthropomorphic mascot to represent its teams.

        The more substantial principle that Dupont does sell out on is that of the scholar/athlete. There is much justified controversy over the de facto college requirement for professional sports, particularly the fact that the colleges profit from it while not allowing their own athletes a cut (imagine having a career-ending injury before you’re allowed to even have a career!). Some would argue that their payment is a pampered free education, and the “pampered” part may be true. However, it is also known that these schools recruit from ghettos solely based on athletic performance. The education received is a joke, and the book documents well not only how athletes have an alternative curricula of easy courses, but also how athletes will purposefully underperform so as to avoid the “nerd” stereotype.

         The novels antagonist, Hoyt Thorpe, represents the worst of these athletes. Prideful and promiscuous, he has enough education to rationalize his reptilian, hedonistic priorities as a reclamation of the pre-Christian virtues of strength and courage. Much like Perelandra's Unman, he uses the fashionably erudite reference of the Greek hero as smokescreen to justify his barbarism. As if Wolfe wasn’t already prescient enough in his eloquent codification of hypocritical woke self-righteousness in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), he called the Bronze Age Mindset (2018) in 2004! As appropriate to the Nietzschean Right’s irrelevancy in the culture war, Hoyt’s pride as an Alpha is tempered by his high status of Lacrosse, one of the few sports he can still dominate as a white person.

         Less pretentious is another white athlete of vaguely Scandinavian nomenclature, Jojo Johanssen, who is a competitive star on the basketball team due to his height. Still, he struggles with academics due to a clerical error committed by his coach’s attractive, but air-headed secretary: he and numerous other teammates have been placed in a legitimate history course taught by a poorly-dressed, overweight liberal professor named Quat who hates the sports program. While his comrades hold their own, Jojo is dependent upon his tutor ghost-writer Adam Gillen, a smart, but financially desperate student who survives writing the papers for these athletes while delivering pizza for a small business owner who somehow gets away with not even paying his delivery boys (their primary source of income is tips). The future of both characters is threatened when Jojo forgets about his paper until the last second, forcing Adam to write the entire thing in one night. As a result, he had no time to simulate Jojo's less sophisticated vocabulary, and the paper is immediately recognized as a fraud by Professor Quat, who relishes in the opportunity to take both of them down.

           Even the left-leaning nerd club that Adam is a part of demonstrates signs of Alpha logic, only their manhoods are expressed intellectually in a scene in which they constantly one-up each other with their theories on how shallow athletic competitions are. It’s a bit too on the nose, to be honest. Interestingly this group is called the “Millennial Mutants,” which reminds me of how “Millennial” once referred to my age group.

           Meanwhile, our heroine Charlotte displays the naivete that would ultimately cause problems for her. She inadvertently ends up in one of the athlete’s French courses and is puzzled by the use of English text when she had already been used to studying in a more advanced way. Her intellectual disappointment intrigues her classmate Jojo, and sparks his kindling interest in education. Amusingly, her overeducation shows when she is momentarily taken aback by the modern architectural usage of the word atrium after mental image of it being influenced by the study of Ancient Roman houses. Her modernized provincialism is demonstrated by her shock when a feminist classmate “forfeits all femininity” by daring a bullying male to take a swing at her, not realizing that it is, in fact, a very traditional use of feminine leverage. This naivete is mixed with some modern social embarrassment when her backwater parents attempt to charm those of her rich roommates.

         These traits are what lead to the climax of the story in which she is ultimately seduced by Hoyt and loses her virginity. Treated like a rag and humiliated, she is thrust into depression and her grades suffer. In keeping with the themes of intellectual hypocrisy, her philosophy teacher is disappointed by his pet students’ fall from grace, despite his love of Fatalism, a paradox common among its practitioners. 

         What ultimately saves Jojo and Adam is a major arc set up at the beginning of the story involving Hoyt. Drunkenly wandering around the campus with a friend at night, he comes across the sight of the visiting RepublicanGovernor in a compromising sex act. He beats up the pursuing bodyguard and escapes, with rumors of the act's reinforcing his status as the Big Man on Campus. To sweeten the deal, he is offered hush money and a job by the Governer. However, Adam’s sleuthing on the subject for the school paper blows the whole thing open, and Quat, caring more about culture war victories than the academic principles he claims to prioritize, drops the case against him and Jojo. Adam has proven himself useful in the fight against both conservativism and the sports program.

          You know Wolfe is based when he goes out of his way to write a villain without drip.

          Charlotte eventually recovers from her depression and forms a mature relationship with Jojo, whose newfound curiosity has caused him to blossom into a genuine scholar as well as a successful athlete. Our more sympathetic characters end up with a happy ending.

          As with most of Wolfe’s fiction, he ends abruptly after the climax, but for some reason it seems more natural here than in his previous books for reasons this dragon can’t quite put his finger on. The writing style is engaging and witty, although Wolfe seems to make it a little too clear that the characters are unsophisticated (he makes a big deal of the jocks’ crude aversion to parted hair from their own pov text, for example). His research is also emphasized by his observance of esoteric ticks, such as the tendency of young girls to randomly pronounce sentences as questions. However I Am Charlotte Simmons displays Wolfe’s ability to bring to light the ideologically-significant trends lurking in society in an engaging story. 

         It should be seen as one of his classics.