It's final four weekend. And I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe's satire of college basketball programs and higher education in the 21st century, is back in the news.
The 2004 book is now out in paperback, and Wolfe has just been tapped to deliver the prestigious Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.
This causes some clucking from Lawrence Biemiller, who offers a kind of thin and predictable review of Wolfe and the "new journalism" in Chronicle of Higher Education. A better understanding of Wolfe's reporting and his importance can be found in the current number of Columbia Journalism Review.
For what it's worth, I like the book. Not for the queasy, however. I haven't heard that many uses of the F-word, in that many grammatical contexts, since the last time I saw "The Big Lebowski." The reporting is clear-eyed, funny, insightful. The writing crackles. You know the people he's writing about, you remember your own experience as a college freshman, you are anxious to see if these people get out of there alive. There are some false notes, maybe inevitable in a 750-page book. For instance, sometimes Wolfe has us inside the head of a character and the character is thinking uncharacteristic thoughts - thinking things that Tom Wolfe would think, not what we've come to expect the character to be thinking. But he creates memorable characters, even though it's important to remember that this is kind of a cartoon fable about what happens to the innocent girl from the small town who comes over the mountain into the "real" world, and finds it much darker, much loneliner, than advertised.
But the real issue, for the critics, especially, comes down to the accuracy of his reporting - Does his assessment of big-campus life as a primordial sewer of drunkenness, wanton promiscuity, big-money sports, and silly ideologies passing for teaching, correspond with reality? Many of his critics, tenured in such institutions, felt compelled not to read the book so much as defend today's college students and their faculties. I don't have a dog in that race. But, if you went to "university" in the late 70s and early 80s, you could certainly see in embryo all the tendencies that Wolfe has found on the campus today.
Mark Bowden has an excellent defense of Wolfe's book as social commentary and satire - and as a novel - in the April issue of The Atlantic (Unfortunately you have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing, but it's worth reading on the newstand or in your library.) If you want to read an intelligent critique, check out Brooke Allen's in The New Criterion.
Meanwhile, Wolfe joins a distinguished list of past Jefferson lecturers - including Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren, Leszek Kolakowski, and more. Look for news on Wolfe's lecture, which promises to be a good one.
