I am NOT Charlotte Simmons

I am currently about 5/7 through the enormous Tom Wolfe tome that is I am Charlotte Simmons, and while it is probably more...journalistically acceptable? to wait until I've finished the whole thing before writing my thoughts on it, I'm too impatient and my reactions are too strong. Which is, I guess, a good thing, this eliciting of strong response, but I'm not sure that's enough to calling it a good book. Because despite being highly readable, I also find it loathsome in many ways.

These two ways can be divided into the micro and the macro, so we'll start with the micro first: the actual character of Charlotte Simmons.

For those of you who don't know the book (it came out four years ago t much media attention, but I'm unsure how much it actually entered the collective consciousness), it tells the story of young Charlotte Simmons from the little mountain town of Sparta, North Carolina, coming to the prestigious (and fictitious) Ivy League Dupont University for her freshmen year of college. While the story focuses on Charlotte, we also follow tangentially a frat boy named Hoyt, a basketball player named Jojo and a brainiac named Adam. That's really all you need know.

Back to Charlotte. She, just like the book, bothers me on both a micro and macro level and, like my overall thoughts on the book, we'll start with the micro here, too. Wolfe, it seems, gave Charlotte a (population: 900) small town background so as to distance her as much as possible from the version of her generation she encounters at Dupont. This is probably smart from an authorial stand point because Tom Wolfe is a 70-something white man and also far outside the universe of the 20-something collegiate, so Charlotte's own discomfort and unfamiliarity can parallel his own and give him a way in. Fine. And, I have to say, I don't think that he does a bad job with it. Charlotte is obnoxious, to be sure, but that doesn't make her necessarily untrue. ..to a point.

Besides being small-town and gorgeous (and we'll address this later), Charlotte is also supposed to be a genius and former high school track star. These two things make the level of her naivete, in my mind, completely implausible because they take away the security blanket of small-town sheltering. We see through the book that, yes, she really is a genius. She knows pretty much everything about everything and has huge exposure to the world in terms of books. This shouldn't give her social skills, but it should give her the awareness that people are somewhat rough and tumble. And as for the track thing, it means she's been in contact with other teenagers, other high schools. That doesn't mean she shouldn't be overwhelmed by college life, but having a minor internal freak out because her roommate says the word "shit"? Really? You're telling me that four years of high school, during which she routinely was around other high schools (and therefore, other teenagers with varied upbringings) she never heard the word "shit"? I find that hard to believe. It's that level of doe-eyed innocence we're talking about, and I don't quite buy it.

Now before I get into the macro, I want to point out that I am sure most or all of what I'm about to say can be said about guys as well. I'm not trying to take up the "media expectations" banner for females alone. It's just that a) I am a girl and b) I'm particularly concerned about the female character (if I start writing about the males in the book, I'll wind up with a book of my own). So understand that all that is about to follow is written about girls, but not with the assumption that you guys don't deal with it, too. Okay? okay. The macro.

Charlotte, as previously mentioned, is supposed to be gorgeous. Fine, I can live with that. Why we can't have an average girl as a heroine, I don't know. Why we can't even have just a pretty girl instead of model-beautiful is also beyond me, but I guess it makes for good copy. But there are, according to this book, lots of model-beautiful girls on campus and certainly many, many attractive ones. And I'm guessing that, in this fictional world, a lot of those girls have vastly superior social skills to those of our Ms. Simmons, not to mention a better fashion sense (the Prairie-Home-Companion nature of her outfits is commented on repeatedly). So why why WHY does every single guy she meets fall for her? I get that a gorgeous girl, even one awkward and poorly dressed, can attract attention, but inspiring full-on pursuit? Fights? I don't buy that. I hate this idea of "the" girl, the one that everyone wants and has to have in some way and will stop at nothing to get. I accept those girls exist, but I don't accept that Charlotte Simmons is that kind of girl. She is prissy and self-righteous and awkward and whatever charms her "innocence" has is not enough, in my opinion, to overcome the impatience it seems anyone who meets her must eventually feel. And I could buy the one frat brother looking on her as a challenge, or a game, but not everyone she ever meets possessing a Y-chromosome. That's not real, not in the way Wolfe is presenting it.

And that's what bothers me. We hear a lot about the pressure put on girls to look a certain way by the media, and I think it's there, though I also think male reaction to the media is really what drives it home. Making Charlotte gorgeous feeds into this because it seems the only reason any guy wants her, really, is her looks, which serves the double purpose of saying a) guys will want you if you're hot and b) being hot excuses a multitude of personality flaws. Neither of which I like, but neither of which bother me as much as her personality, which is presented as somehow being attractive as well. She's annoying, she's obnoxious, she's self-righteous, painfully (neigh, stupidly) naive and she's weak-willed. Yet somehow, this is attractive? This is what I should want to be, because even though I hate it, the guys eat it up? Or this is what I can be, if only I'm really really hot? Either way, I hate the implication.

I was going to go on about the personality pressures put on girls, but I'm running out of steam and I haven't even gotten to why the book really bothers me. So, onto that.

As I think I mentioned, I'm finding the book highly readable. It's almost 700 pages and I've been blowing through it and, for all of my issues with the main character, I haven't been tempted to throw it across the room like with the Twilight series (no judgments, it was a cultural phenomenon, I had to stay up-to-date). And, I have to say, save for the aforementioned (I love that word) qualms about the plausibility of Charlotte herself, I find a lot of it to be quite accurate, save for one thing: the inevitability of it all. There is a driving sense that this is what happens at college, period, the end, no discussion. If you are 18 and female and going into freshmen year, you will become a tragic example of peer pressure gone awry, unless you instead become a slut or a militant loser. As for you boys, you will either be hot and have shit-for-brains and stone-for-heart OR be average looking and capable of having a conversation. There is no other alternative. And don't even think about doing homework or caring about anything besides getting laid or getting revenge on the guys that picked on you because you will be ridiculed and destroyed.

We are not like that, not all of us, and I absolutely resent the implication otherwise. That there is no other alternative, that this is how it is. My generation has more to offer than that. There's drinking, there's sex, but the pursuit of one or both doesn't come at the exclusion of everything else. We work for things, we care about things, we make connections based more on looks and one-upmanship, and that Wolfe doesn't show even an ounce of that is infuriating to me. When this books came out there was a lot of emphasis placed on how this is what was really going on on campuses these days. This i what your son or daughter was really up to, this was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And yes, it is true, but it's not the whole truth and it's not the last word, and I feel especially coming from an author such as Tom Wolfe it does get this aura of credibility and infallibility it just doesn't deserve. We are worth more than this book implies! The destruction of our souls, morals and ambitions is not inevitably linked with that college acceptance letter!

I'm sure there's more I want to say on this subject, but I'll let it rest for now. Have any of you read this book? Do you have thoughts? Am I totally overreacting, as I am wont to do? Talk me down.