I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe
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Undergraduate loins do a lot of stirring in Tom Wolfe's overwritten, uninspiring campus novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons.
Wolfe writes of one student athlete, emphasis on athlete: "His loins stirred so, he could feel the tumescence against the fly of his jeans."
At the campus fitness center, another young scholar is aroused by the sight of the tops of bobbing breasts: "His own loins were on the qui vive, as if something were about to . . . happen in this so-called fitness center . . . Oh, loamy, loamy loins!"
In another scene, "his loins certainly remained alive . . . welling up beneath his tighty-whiteys."
You get the idea. Most of the students at Wolfe's fictional Dupont University are obsessed with sex or sports or both. It's considered uncool to spend much time studying, and those who do often do it on the sly.
Wolfe, a master essayist and journalist, may have captured the spirit of the go-go, cash-'em-in '80s in The Bonfire of the Vanities. But I Am Charlotte Simmons belabors the obvious.
The plot revolves about Charlotte Simmons, the innocent pride and hope of a small, struggling town in North Carolina. She wins a scholarship to Dupont, an elite school that ranks up there with Harvard and Stanford.
But the education of Charlotte Simmons turns into a melodrama that could be subtitled Why Smart Girls Do Dumb Things for Bad Boyfriends.
Wolfe's targets are as easy as they come. He lights into the hypocrisy of big-time college sports, where jocks are steered to "athlete-friendly" professors who teach gut courses known as "Rocks for Jocks" and "Stocks for Jocks."
And he delights in detailing the decadence of snobbish, beer-soaked, sex-obsessed frat boys. He describes a frat house where a flood from an upstairs bathroom had ruined its library:
"The once-elegant walnut shelves, which had the remains of fine Victorian moldings along all the edges, now held dead beer cans and empty pizza delivery boxes funky with the odor of cheese. The library's one trove of mankind's accumulated knowledge at this moment in history was the TV set."
Some of Wolfe's set pieces sparkle, especially the interior view of a college basketball game. But there are too few gems of good writing in 676 pages.
Wolfe writes of one frat boy: "His strong suit was humor, irony, insouciance, and being coolly gross, Animal House-style. . . . It was actually all about being a man in the Age of the Wuss."
That student thinks, "If America ever had to go to war again, fight with the country's fate on the line, not just in some 'police action,' there would be only one source of officers other than the military academies: frat boys. They were the only educated males left who were conditioned to think and react . . . like men."
If there was an "Age of the Wuss," it ended on Sept. 11, 2001, and with the war in Iraq. To hear self-obsessed fraternity guys call each other "warriors" while real warriors are dying in Iraq turns Wolfe's novel into a relic, despite all the loamy loins.