Recreational sex: lost souls at the university

I Am Charlotte Simmons. By Tom Wolfe. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 688 pp., $28.95.

TOM WOLFE MAY deny that his novel is about Duke, but having spent 20 years there I know a few things about the school. Wolfe's "Dupont University" has the same number of undergrads as Duke, the same fraternity-sorority dominance of the social scene, the same veneration of basketball, and a dozen other similarities. For almost 700 rollicking, mocking pages, Wolfe nails university life--or at least a segment of it.

At Dupont, mechanistic, positivistic neuroscience is the queen of the sciences. Teachers are irrelevant in this collegiate world where late adolescents are in the hands of the most totalitarian group of all--their peers. When faculty do appear, they are inconsequential, hypocritical old people who are engaged in mostly trivial pursuits that they pass off as intellectual.

This is the setting for Wolfe's morality tale about Charlotte Simmons, a naive freshman--so naive it is barely believable. Her story begins at her high school graduation celebration in small-town North Carolina. She expects college to be a place where you go to think deep thoughts. She finds out it is mostly a place where you go to rut like rabbits. Everybody's doing the dirty at Dupont. About two thirds of the novel deals with sex. Some of the funniest, most drippingly ironic passages are about sexual sell-expression.

Sex at Dupont is mostly recreational, but sometimes, as Charlotte discovers, sex is about power, the power to define other human beings and their worth. The ersatz undergraduate rebellion against parents through sex is, in reality, a sure sign that the morality of the old folks has triumphed.

I got tired of Wolfe's attentiveness to the lives of vacuous young adults (if these losers were the only students one encountered at a college, any self-respecting member of the faculty would blow his or her brains out). Wolfe's carnal carnival includes none of the other folks one finds on campus: the grimly driven but relentlessly focused pre-professional students, the tree buggers, the bloggers, the computer geeks, the feminist revolutionaries, the shorthaired neocons, the long-haired antiestablishmentarian throwbacks to the 1960s, the idealistic community servants--and the spiritual seekers and adventurers.

An exception to the general aimlessness is Adam Gellin, a scholarship student who, by following all the rules and acing every test, hopes to ride a Rhodes scholarship to the top of the capitalist heap. Adam is smitten with Charlotte, but she fails to notice him. Adam isn't so much an intellectual as an opportunist who counts on college for his ticket to success. (At Duke the most popular undergrad major is economics.)

Hoyt Thorpe is the chief representative of that elite class known as the men of the Saint Rays, fraternity. There is a gloominess about his demanding frat world where all must dress, talk, guzzle and hump alike. Someday their parents may hand them off to a world of wealth and privilege, but for now college is a grim boot camp where the frat teaches them how to get and to stay on top, particularly on top of the women. It's a Darwinian universe in which the big fish eat the little ones, or at least hook up with them.

Much of the novel follows Hoyt's caddish attempt to get atop Charlotte, followed by Charlotte's self constructed redemption ("I, Charlotte Simmons, will now ascend forever above the cheap, sordid, vulgar milieu"). I found this plot twist implausible. It's unlikely that a poor country girl like Charlotte would have the opportunity to speak to, much less have sex with, a blue-blooded Connecticut dandy like Hoyt. College life is more ruthlessly segregated than that.

Still, Wolfe's depiction of Charlotte's fall is worthy of Flaubert, though it's more disgusting and vulgar, in a smirking sort of way, than any story Flaubert would have written. Big fish like Hoyt must stamp out any signs of independent life, and little fish like Charlotte eventually submit to the ruthlessly enforced authority of the in crowd.

The book demonstrates Wolfe's lifetime fascination with and gift for language. Charlotte succumbs to Hoyt's syntax rather than his physique. The novel is a brilliant demonstration of the power of language to define groups, to warp character, and to empower some people over others. Wolfe has a marvelous ear for patterns of speech and details of dialogue (except for his strained references to rap lyrics and basketball jive, which sound like an old guy's rendition of the way young guys talk). He takes profanity to new heights, or depths. You don't know the power of four-letter words to demarcate territory and to assert dominance until you bear Wolfe's characters cuss.

The novel has some major flaws. Jojo Johanssen, Dupont's one white basketball player, is transformed from the stupidest of all jocks into a decent human being who is interested in French literature and the philosophy of justice. Though I believe in miracles, I found this redemption incredible. Wolfe's references to Britney Spears as a campus cultural icon are anachronistic. In places, he seems to be talking about campus life of ten years ago. Wolfe also makes a number of snafus in his description of that religion known as basketball--though he captures the way collegiate athletics are big business.