Wolfe with no howl
livef
rumpled white suit
I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS.
By Tom Wolfe.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 678 pp. $28.95.
Tom Wolfe is America's celebrated satirist and dandy. He has a good
track record for chronicling the worst of our human traits with the
finest literary aplomb, then launching book tours in his infamous white
suit (Houston is not on the schedule). One has the sense in his new
novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, that something has backfired, that this
time the foppish suit has won out over genuine intellectual effort.
I Am Charlotte Simmons takes place at Dupont University, a scantily
clad Ivy League amalgam in Pennsylvania. We wade into this 678-page
book with a small article about a Dupont professor who has surgically
altered a set of cats. The amygdalectomized cats have gone into a
hypermanic state of sexual arousal. These feline sex maniacs attempt
copulation with such frenzy that they can convert normal, unaltered
cats.
That is subtle foreshadowing à la Tom Wolfe. In I Am Charlotte Simmons
we find that Dupont University's culture of bitterly depraved students
(virtually the entire student body) threatens to pervert the uniquely
pure and impoverished smarty, Charlotte Simmons. Charlotte hails from
Sparta, N.C., a tiny town (or tay-un, in her Allegheny accent) in the
mountains seemingly cut off from magazines, television or newspapers
that (they-ut) might have informed a young girl's social intelligence.
She arrives on campus in a beat-up truck with her meager sacks of
necessities. Immediately it's onto the Tom Wolfe roller coaster of
derisive dorm mates; bathroom-stall eruptions in Dolby stereo; rich,
anorexic roommates; studly frat boys with blond hair and cleft chins;
coddled sports stars with free cars; nerdy wonks with chips on their
shoulders; and pompous professors, such as Mr. Starling, who conducted
the infamous cat experiment and won a Nobel Prize.
Wolfe's satire is woefully clichéd. We wait in vain for fresh
observations about college life or a clever State of the Youth report.
Instead, Wolfe's usual baroque manner of speech is punctuated to slow
death by collegiate cussing. The f***s and the s***s go stale fast.
There are too many words for the simple story of who will ultimately
win goody-two-shoes Charlotte Simmons. Will it be Hoyt Thorpe, the
handsome fraternity boy with the moral code of a worm? Will it be Jojo
Johanssen, the white basketball star and proverbial jock who morphs
into a born-again scholar after he bumps into Charlotte? Will it be
Adam Gellin, the short ugly kid and intellectual nebbish?
What's missing is a real experience. When Wolfe does chance to
sentimentalize or search a character, the moment feels lumpy and
awkward. Charlotte, alone in her dorm room one night, reflects:
"What was it, this implacable remoteness, this inability to surrender
herself to the warmth and comradely feelings of others? Could being an
academic star, being applauded over and over again as a prodigy, take
the place of all that? She shuddered with a feeling she couldn't have
put a name to. It was the congenital human fear of isolation."
But lo! says Wolfe. Isolation is not the fear of men. "Where is the
poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the
cut that never heals -- male humiliation?" Men fear the "h" word. Too
bad, because Wolfe is all about (a-bay-ut) humiliation through satire.
In the past he has targeted unscrupulous corporations, inbred arts
cultures, greed-laced businessmen. In I Am Charlotte Simmons we are
treated to an alpha-to-omega pageant of unlikable kids who simply
aren't mature enough to despise.
Our ridiculously naive heroine keeps chanting to herself. She is as
determined as a Panzer tank to hold her course in the midst of this
Sodom and Gomorrah. Occasionally we root for her. Mostly her insistence
on 100 percent wholesomeness is irritating. When Charlotte suddenly
tarts up and gets drunk at a fraternity ball, we're bug-eyed with
confusion.
There is an expectation, with Wolfe, that his satire will expose the
follies of some cultural depravity, illuminating an underside of our
zeitgeist. His mastery of acute detail is what the reader longs for.
Even his dandyish pretense -- that he has plumbed the depths, as never
before, of a peculiarly American wickedness -- can at times be
charming. But college life? College coeds and their prepossession with
sex and partying and swearing?
Wolfe strayed off his own path with I Am Charlotte Simmons, this time
giving his loyal readers only a bonfire of his own vanities. Maybe he's
just tired (jes tarred).
------------------------------------------------------------
link:
http://www.cn-020.com/ China
http://www.hydaily.com/ fu zhuang
http://www.qichetg.com/ car buy of team
http://www.hongtaihair.com/ Women's Hair