I’ve heard more buzz about Tom Wolfe’s book I Am Charlotte Simmons than any other this Christmas season, so I decided to pick it up and read it. The novel centers around Charlotte, a naive new student at Dupont University, a school boasting a top-ranked basketball program and an Ivy League academic reputation. Although Dupont is an elite university, the atmosphere is typical of most colleges today - sex, alcohol, and social status rule the day. A drive for material wealth, physical pleasure, and a well-placed social status are priorities, and academics are only important insofar as they help achieve those goals.

Some have criticized Wolfe’s portrayal of the contemporary college scene as inaccurate, but those critics are typically out of touch. The novel is a satire, but the portrayal is depressingly close to reality. Sex plays a big role, but it does in real life too. For example, there’s the common phenomenon of being “sexiled,” code word for being kicked out of your room for extended periods while the roommate “hooks up” with a “friend with benefits.” Wolfe’s typically fantastic prose strikes the perfect chord - a disinterested description, humorous and rich, but not necessarily crude.

Despite her upbringing and community code, Charlotte gets caught in the game. As John Derbyshire described it, Charlotte’s innocence is “destroyed as swiftly, coldly, and thoroughly as a kitten that has wandered onto a busy six-lane expressway.” The guilt and grappling with expectations weighs heavily on her and other supporting characters.

One could confine the novel to this and it would be a wonderful book, but this is a Tom Wolfe novel, and as such he takes it to a new and exciting level. In fact, the central tension in the novel is not sex or modernity’s colleges, at least not directly. Instead it’s neuroscience’s understanding of human nature. Charlotte takes a course on neuroscience taught by Nobel Prize winning Prof. Sterling. Wolfe uses this as a means to explore the field in depth, and he demonstrates that the field is more developed than most non-scientists realize. The deconstruction of self isn’t new and has in fact been around for hundreds of years, but now more than ever the science is backing up the philosophy.

The conscious self is scrutinized because science tells us it may be nothing more than a series of chemical reactions, sometimes genetic. Characters continually struggle with the existence of souls, whether they have one, and what the implications might be. Prof. Sterling tells us that the self is “nothing more than a ‘transient composite of materials from the environment.’” Neuroscience is turning philosophy and religion upside down according to Sterling, and in this belief Charlotte finds the intellectual awaking she was craving. She walks out of class one day and explains that her classmates are “blithely ignorant of the fact” that they are “merely conscious little rocks, every one of them, whereas. . . I am Charlotte Simmons.”

Here, in my mind, Wolfe demonstrates part of his genius. Charlotte’s exultions of herself, and her comprehension, are themselves chemical reactions by Sterling’s philosophy. There is a terribly dehumanizing and deconstructing effect to all of this, and although it’s set in a fiction novel they are issues facing us square in the face in reality. We’re all in Dupont University now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 23rd, 2004 at 3:49 pm by Mystery Man and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.