Heffenator,
It pains me to bring my half of this dialogue to a close; it’s been such a pleasure. I love your distinction between the stuff we sense that Scarlett O’Hara and Becky Sharp are made of and the stuff—the indifferent literary prose—that made them. But methinks you may have lighted a Candle in the Wind here: Poor Charlotte will likely never break free of her creator. I see her holy innocence, but where is her unholy desire? She has none of the vinegar (or melancholy) it takes to become even a schlock icon. As to Henry James, he made it a fair fight only once, with Isabel Archer; she battles for her dignity against James’ ulterior, and not so ulterior, purposes as much as against Gilbert Osmond, so I’d place her near your trio, if not exactly among them. (As for literary antecedents for Charlotte, the final one I come up with is the Lady from Milton’s Comus: “thou unblemish’t form of Chastity.” Zzzzzzz.) And by the by, that’ll be me, Virginia, wearing the crappy jeans in the Phase II cafeteria of the Sunset Park Leisure Care Facility—so watch it.
In all sincerity, here is what I like about Wolfe and this goofy novel. Too often we extrapolate a set of qualities common to the people who still read literary fiction, then hold them as expectations when reading fiction itself. As a result, a lot of awful work—overwritten, overfelt, mincing, and oppressively fine—gets lazily tabbed “literature.” By being so unapologetically middlebrow, Tom Wolfe isn’t middlebrow. (He’s may not be great, but at least he’s not giving us Shopgirl.) Were it left at that, one could respectfully keep one’s Ginsu sheathed. But Wolfe has never been content to leave it at that. The best piece on how jealously Wolfe argues for his own pre-eminence is still Jim Windolf’s, and I can’t pretend to improve on it. But in promoting this latest novel, Wolfe has been repeating his old saw, about how every human consideration is finally a status consideration; and he has picked up a high-profile defender in David Brooks. Now, it’s Brooks’ job, as the Likable Conservative, to put a friendly face on the indefensible; and in this column he almost succeeds in transferring responsibility for Wolfe’s awful novel onto its reviewers. So it’s worth explaining why, in addition to being sprawling and fun, I Am Charlotte Simmons is also hateful and small, and in precisely those ways that will deprive Wolfe of the literary reputation he so craves.
Wolfe chose the contemporary American university as the setting for I Am Charlotte Simmons, but the roiling Orgasmatron he lays before the reader will be familiar to precisely no one. What is a real university in the actual 21st century actually like? It’s a research institution; an intergenerational transfer station for high culture; a talent sorting mechanism, and thus a gateway to the professions; and a (give or take) four-year holding pen for the children of the bourgeoisie. Of these, Wolfe chose to highlight the last, add some elements of the first, and suppress to near-invisibility two and three. In sum, Wolfe punched up to phantasmagorical heights everything about a university related to status, crudely understood, while burying everything about a university that has to do with prestige. Why? As Wolfe sees it, status is real: It’s rooted in biology and the primitive quest for sexual privilege. Prestige, meanwhile, is artificial, a conspiracy of the overrefined whose only real power is the power to shame and exclude. Wolfe has devoted entire swaths of his career to pointing out how the world of prestige is fraudulent: that modern art is a scam, that The New Yorker is the product of “tiny mummies,” and that the literary novel has become “weak, pale, tabescent.”
Those who would praise Wolfe for being horrified by the bestial reversion of the young fail to see how much of a relief this reversion is to Wolfe. After all, it takes a mammoth effort of willful suppression to depict, over the course of nearly 700 pages, life at a prestigious university as one entirely devoid of warmth, friendship, love, belonging, self-mastery, or meaningful accomplishment—or, for that matter, pleasure of any kind detached from the brute mastery of others. What terrifies Wolfe most, then, isn’t debauchery; it’s cultural snobbery of the sort that routinely assigns Tom Wolfe to the second or third tier of literary talents. This has become so pathological with Wolfe that he seems to perceive any social arrangement that allows for self-refinement or aesthetic contemplation not merely as a fraud but as an offense against human nature. (Don’t believe me? Read I Am Charlotte Simmons, in which there are two kinds of men: cowards and overlords.) The temptation in American life is always to give in to this bleak idea, of an endless death struggle for status, because the basis for American life is Hobbesian individualism. But the basis for a university, and any culture in which meaningful value judgments are still possible, isn’t Hobbesian; it’s Lawrentian: “Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.” Surely that purpose can’t be driving an Escalade or living at 820 Fifth Ave.
Wolfe, though, in his own person is self-refuting. He himself, in his need for the laurel, for lasting critical esteem, proves that people’s desires are wildly variable and idiosyncratic. He has no end to money and status, and yet his craving for something more has proven incorrigible. What an interesting character for a novel! Pity: If only he had learned to navel-gaze a little better. As it is, his work is news that won’t stay news.
An utter delight, Virginia. Be well!
Steve
