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Off at College (Tom Wolfe)

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Walter Yannis [OP]

2005-02-24 11:09 | User Profile

Off at College [URL=http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0502/reviews/glendon.htm]First Things[/URL]

I Am Charlotte Simmons By Tom Wolfe. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 646 pp. $28.95. Reviewed by Mary Ann Glendon

When the heroine of I Am Charlotte Simmons—a smart, beautiful, small-town girl—sits down to write her mother a letter about freshman life in “Dupont University,” it takes her hours to produce a “long, well-intentioned lie.” What Charlotte Simmons can’t bring herself to reveal, author Tom Wolfe has already spelled out in several hundred pages of details that add up to a parent’s worst nightmare.

So graphic is Wolfe’s skillful portrayal of binge drinking, foul language, academic dishonesty, and predatory sex on an elite college campus that it is hard to imagine that many readers will actually enjoy this book. Even the partying scenes are joyless, more in the mood of a canvas by Bosch than one by Brueghel. Within days of the novel’s publication, a host of reviewers had insisted—a bit too stridently—that there was not much to learn from this extended exposure of the seamy side of college life. Some thought it exaggerated, and some faulted Wolfe for laboring what everyone already knows: students drink, cheat, and have sex; professors and administrators have agendas. So what?

To this parent and educator, it seems that Wolfe’s four years of research enabled the satirist to produce a credible composite portrayal of a young woman’s struggle to hold on to, and develop, her sense of self in an environment where professors treat such concepts as “self” and “soul” as illusions, and where young people are left almost completely free to act on their most primitive impulses. In addition to dramatizing Charlotte’s immersion in this world, Wolfe also explores the parallel difficulties experienced by three very different male students as they try to figure out what it is to be a man. For anyone who still hopes that college is a place where young men and women are helped to learn how to make decisions wisely and well, this book will be profoundly unsettling. Not only have institutions of higher education decisively rejected the role of in loco parentis, but they are increasingly populated by children whose parents have abdicated their own responsibility.

Tom Wolfe was drawn to the subject of university life, he told an interviewer, when he realized that college has “more and more replaced the church as the source of new values, of new ethical outlooks.” Though conceding that “sex, booze, and status” have always been part of the college scene, Wolfe declared that the contemporary situation is different in that, “with a few exceptions, universities have totally abandoned the idea of strengthening character, and this enormous change” seems to have been “hardest on young women.”

In Charlotte Simmons, one finds all the features that have made Wolfe one of the greatest contemporary North American novelists: a plot that drives at breakneck speed through a major culture-shaping institution, an array of flawed yet yearning characters tested to the limits of their endurance, and startlingly authentic dialogue. Wolfe shows again why he has been compared to Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and Zola. But in this book Wolfe has stretched the form of the novel in a way that invites comparison with novelists such as Albert Camus and Walker Percy, who explored in their fiction (as well as in essays) the ways in which modern philosophy and science have unsettled our understanding of what it means to be human.

Wolfe has chapters set in the neuroscience classroom interspersed among chapters tracing the social and personal lives of Charlotte and her friends, and by this device Wolfe probes deeply into the nature of personal identity, free will, and the relation between the mind and the brain. What does it mean to say “I am Charlotte Simmons” when the Charlotte Simmons who has spent a year at Dupont University is in many ways not the same person whose parents left her there the previous fall? Wolfe’s unobtrusive allusions to the literature on cognitional theory show that he has done his homework.

We first meet Charlotte Simmons on the eve of her departure from Sparta, North Carolina, where, as a gifted student, she had felt rather isolated from (and superior to) her high school classmates. Her scholarship to renowned Dupont University will enable her, she thinks, “to find people like herself, people who actually have a life of the mind.”

Instead, she finds profound loneliness and, even worse, a drastic loss of privacy. Back in Sparta, when adolescent boys strayed beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior, older men nudged them back into line. But in the co-ed bathroom of her dorm, Charlotte gets her first glimpse of a world where normal restraints on language and conduct have been suspended.

What Charlotte can’t bear to tell her mother is that there is no privacy anywhere at Dupont, including the room she shares with snooty, Groton-educated Beverly. Affluent and already initiated in vice, Beverly is quickly accepted into Dupont’s popular set. In the kind of letter Charlotte wishes she could write, she imagines crying out the truth: “[Beverly] brings boys into bed—and they rut-rut-rut do it—barely four feet from my bed! She leads a wanton sex life! The whole place does! . . . Right in front of you! Momma—what am I to do . . . ?”

With no one to talk to, Charlotte feels a loneliness so deep that it is almost tangible: “It wasn’t merely that she had no friends. She didn’t even have a sanctuary in which she could be simply alone.” For a while, successes in the classroom carry her through. She tries to tell herself: “Charlotte Simmons was above them all. They were specimens for her to study.” She recalls her mother’s parting words about how to deal with people who try to push you into things you don’t want to do: “All you got to say is, ‘I’m Charlotte Simmons, and I don’t hold with things like ’at.’ And they’ll respect you for that.”

But a part ofCharlotte begins to long for acceptance by her peers and even for popularity. In what must surely rank as one of the most squalid seduction scenes in literature, Charlotte’s Spartan self-confidence is overcome by a combination of alcohol, a handsome frat boy’s flattery, and her own ambivalent yearnings to be noticed and envied. Disasters follow thick and fast. In full view of others, Charlotte is humiliated, degraded, and dumped by the caddish Hoyt. As the story spreads around campus, she slides into depression, unable to eat, sleep, or face going to class. Christmas break brings further torment rather than relief, because she now feels estranged even from her family. She can’t enter into their festivities, nor can she respond to her mother’s anxious questions about what’s troubling her.

Charlotte’s recovery from depression involves finding a friend at last. The nerdy, intellectual Adam helps to nurse her back to health. He is smitten with Charlotte, but she is no longer the girl who was hoping to find a soul mate with whom to share the life of the mind. A clever girl after all, she is figuring out how to master the Dupont system. When Adam himself needs support, she is just too busy. Her own sense of herself has become increasingly bound up with how she appears in the eyes of others. When a basketball star in a jam seeks her advice, she is happy to oblige, but she is so intent on being noticed in his company that she barely hears what he has to say. (“She sure hoped Lucy Page and Gloria got a load of Jojo’s anxious body language.”)

Charlotte gradually gets back on the academic track, but too late to save her first semester grades. The excuses she offers her parents for her poor performance are lame. Momma, who is no fool, tells her daughter, “Sounds to me like what you need right now is a talk with your own soul, an honest talk.”

The evolving Charlotte thinks about that advice now and then. Her neuroscience professor says that words like “soul” have no meaning. And yet, “Why do you keep waiting deep in the back of my head, Momma, during my every conscious moment—waiting for me to have that conversation?” What does it mean, she fleetingly wonders, to say, “I am Charlotte Simmons”? Wolfe leaves the reader wondering, too.

What he does not leave in doubt in this morally serious work is the powerful influence that environment can exert upon young men and women at crucial formative stages in their journey through life. The point is lifted up in a prefatory note, ostensibly drawn from the capsule biography of a Dupont professor, describing the experiments that won him fame. There we learn that when Dr. Starling removed the amygdala from the brains of laboratory cats, he observed them “to veer helplessly from one inappropriate affect to another, boredom where there should be fear, cringing where there should be preening, sexual arousal where there was nothing that would stimulate an intact animal.” More surprising was what happened next: when intact “control” cats were exposed to the altered cats, they too began attempting indiscriminately to copulate with any object they encountered. Starling became celebrated for his discovery “that a strong social or ‘cultural’ atmosphere . . . could in time overwhelm the genetically determined responses of perfectly normal, healthy animals.”

Because environments do influence the decisions and actions by which we constitute ourselves as one kind of person or another, this book should be mandatory reading for those who may like it least—mothers and fathers of college-bound young men and women. If it is as widely read and discussed as it deserves to be, I Am Charlotte Simmons will at least encourage parents to ask more searching questions during the recruitment process, and to make informed choices among educational institutions. It may even prompt some soul-searching on the part of those who set policy in colleges and universities.

Mary Ann Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University and President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Quantrill

2005-02-24 15:17 | User Profile

Walter, I've seen your discussions with Faust regarding the wisdom of sending your daughter off to Georgetown, and I can see both sides to the argument. All I would offer is a plea that you prepare your daughter for the cesspool in which she will find herself. As the saying goes, when you make a deal with the devil, keep one hand on your soul.

Walter Yannis

2005-02-24 15:49 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Quantrill]Walter, I've seen your discussions with Faust regarding the wisdom of sending your daughter off to Georgetown, and I can see both sides to the argument. All I would offer is a plea that you prepare your daughter for the cesspool in which she will find herself. As the saying goes, when you make a deal with the devil, keep one hand on your soul.[/QUOTE]

Note that Mary Ann Glendon teaches at Harvard Law.

We need hundred more like her.

Ponce

2005-02-24 16:50 | User Profile

I never had any kids but if I have had a daughter I really would not kow which college I would send her to.

No matter wich college you sent her to you know that she is going to get screw and drunk and only the devil knows what else.

But if I had a son I would tell him to have fun and to do some studying, no matter what I would tell him that's what he would do.

But of course the whole thing comes down as to how your kids were brough up and how mature they are by the time they are ready to go to college.

arkady

2005-02-24 16:54 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]Off at College...

...Not only have institutions of higher education decisively rejected the role of in loco parentis, but they are increasingly populated by children whose parents have abdicated their own responsibility...

If they had real parents at home, there'd be no need for institutions to adopt in loco parentis.

...Because environments do influence the decisions and actions by which we constitute ourselves as one kind of person or another, this book should be mandatory reading for those who may like it least—mothers and fathers of college-bound young men and women. If it is as widely read and discussed as it deserves to be...

It won't be.

...I Am Charlotte Simmons will at least encourage parents to ask more searching questions during the recruitment process, and to make informed choices among educational institutions.

They won't.

It may even prompt some soul-searching on the part of those who set policy in colleges and universities.

Ha, ha! Hahahahaha! Hahahahaha! HAHAHAHAH!! (falls to floor, gibbering with helpless laughter).

Walter Yannis

2005-02-24 19:09 | User Profile

[QUOTE=arkady]Ha, ha! Hahahahaha! Hahahahaha! HAHAHAHAH!! (falls to floor, gibbering with helpless laughter).[/QUOTE]

:punk:

Yeah, I have to say that's pretty damned naive, and this from a long tenured professor of Harvard Law.

She can't be serious. Surely the brilliant Mary Ann Glendon understands what the Culture of Critique means by now.

Faust

2005-02-24 22:09 | User Profile

Related thread:
I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe [url]http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16260[/url]

Jack Cassidy

2005-02-25 04:49 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]

Mary Ann Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University and President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.[/QUOTE]I went to an estate sale at the Watergate a few years ago. The apartment belonged to Elizabeth Hand, the niece of Learned Hand. I bought some ornate spoons that belonged to Learned Hand (they had his name engraved on them). If you saw them they'd creep you out, they had the head of the Devil on the handles. It was then, for the first time, I seriously thought about all the poweful people being part of some Satanic conspiracy. I have since given the spoons to my sister, a compulsive collector.

weisbrot

2005-02-25 19:50 | User Profile

An excellent review.

I finished this book a couple days ago, and my reaction was much the same as Ms. Glendon's seemed to be. Wolfe is as usual spot-on in his character's inner and outer dialogue and development. He seems to be beyond cynical in portraying university life; there isn't a facet of the college experience left unskewered. All the stereotypical (i.e., so prevalent as to be true) characters and experiences are drawn, examined and obliterated. I met and knew many of the people in this book, although I went to a much smaller school long ago. I cringe at a lot of the memories, and at some of my own actions or actions not taken. This was a somewhat uncomfortable reminder of some aspects my own experience, which I think and hope was not nearly as nihilistic or wasted as the experience of most of the books characters. I believe Wolfe's account, and it is saddening to think that the university experience has become this bleak.

Ms. Glendon does not- of course- examine Wolfe's brief but devastating portrayals of the Jewish university president and his interactions with a Jewish professor, nor one of the main characters thoughts about his own Judaism and how that Judaism is implied to be manifest in his actions. Wolfe has his Jewish university president ruminate on how the Jewish professor he is confronting is typically, well, Jewish, and while the president shares most of his (the professors) views, he (the president) is superior due mainly to his ability to interact with rich and powerful goyim:

[I]"The man sitting across from him...was of another sort entirely, despite the fact that they were both Jewish and agreed on practically every public issue of the day. Both believed passionately in protecting minorities, particularly African Americans as well as Jews. Both regarded Israel as the most important nation on earth, although neither was tempted to live there...Both believed in abortion, not so much because they thought anyone they knew might want an abortion as because legalizing it helped put an exhausted and dysfunctional Christendom and its weird, hidebound religious restraints in their place. For the same reason, both believed in gay rights, womens rights, transgender rights...gun control, contemporary art and the Democratic party."[/I]

The university president goes on to conclude that in spite of all above being true of both men's beliefs, only the president is a "man of the world" with vision, due to his ability to put those observations and beliefs aside and deal with the powerful goyim. This passage is almost completely stripped out of Culture of Critique, and is probably the main reason for the book's tepid reception by most critics.

With even one of the most repellant characters- the white frat boy who takes advantage of Charlotte's innocence in numerous ways- Wolfe is not quite able to develop the skin-crawling, total contempt he displays for Professor Quat or the smoothly amoral university president. It struck me that the sleazy "frat boy" Hoyt could be representative of today's MTV youth and their complete absorption and acceptance of the values, priorities and beliefs that are constantly being presented to them by the cultural "powers that be"- a group from which spring university presidents and professors like those two above. Although Hoyt and his group ridicule and reject homosexuals and their weak attempts to grasp power, the Jewish characters are shown to- at least internally- share the same contempt for homosexuals shown by the whites. Only, just as in the president's inner thoughts above, they are shown to be able to subsume their disgust in order to promote greater goals (which in the case of the professor is destruction of white Christian culture) and personal success (as in the case of the Jewish "geek" and campus reporter).

It's a tough and long read, but I highly recommend this book- especially to anyone who is, like me, looking ahead to sending their most precious possessions on to institutions of higher learning such as the Dupont U. (aka Duke) portrayed in Wolfe's novel. This book will leave you somewhat depressed, but also in awe of Wolfe's still-muscular powers of characterization and quite wary- if you weren't already- of the entire educational system as it exists today.

il ragno

2005-02-25 23:43 | User Profile

[QUOTE]If they had real parents at home, there'd be no need for institutions to adopt in loco parentis.[/QUOTE]

Read the bit about Dr Starling's experiments on cats once more.

Walter Yannis

2005-02-26 05:35 | User Profile

[QUOTE=weisbrot]An excellent review.

[/QUOTE]

Great stuff, Weisbrot.

Thanks.

Faust

2005-02-27 01:27 | User Profile

Quantrill

Well... But as Walter Yannis and Mwdallas said I am just a stupid Ozark Hillbilly so no one cares what I think... well got to go and check my Still and see how my Possum Stew is coming along.

[QUOTE]Walter, I've seen your discussions with Faust regarding the wisdom of sending your daughter off to Georgetown, and I can see both sides to the argument. All I would offer is a plea that you prepare your daughter for the cesspool in which she will find herself. As the saying goes, when you make a deal with the devil, keep one hand on your soul.[/QUOTE]

I think what I laid was a "middle path" not rejecting the society we live in and dome ideas on dealing with it. I did not say "do not go to collage"; I said walk carefully and teach you children to deal with world around us. I did say keep your children out of the control of "resident life." This is a system made by the Frankfurt Schoolers to destroy the morals of young people.

What I said: [QUOTE]Advice to parents of students going to college.

Send them to local two-year college and live at home for four semesters. Make sure they get a good car. Have them get a part time job. Let them gain a bit of maturity and responsibility before they goes out totally on their own. And then have them get an apartment off campus and finish at a four year college. The dorms on many campuses are real cesspools. Also the two-year college is cheaper too. I think would make for a better person I wish I done it that way.

Doing well on a debauched college campus does not have much to do with the "real world." Often the most debauched students are the ones who do not work and thier parents are paying all thier bills.

Outside of a few academic snobs, people do not care much about "good" colleges. When I was graduated from high school I did want to do well in college and go to graduate school, but I can not get too excited about. I do not think I could suck up enough to Professors in order to get into graduate school. I was not greatly impressed by many of them anyway. And pleasing some wage-slave-master have never been one of my goals in life. And in good part they do not care about it either.

Any thoughts?[/QUOTE]