I Am Charlotte Simmons
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I Am Charlotte Simmons is a 2004 novel by Tom Wolfe, concerning sexual and status relationships at the fictional Dupont University, closely modeled after Duke University and Stanford University. Wolfe researched the novel by talking to students at Duke, Stanford, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Florida, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan.
As of May 2008, music video director Liz Friedlander is signed to direct a movie adaptation; casting and other specifics are still uncertain.
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[edit] Plot summary
I am Charlotte Simmons is the story of young freshman college student Charlotte Simmons and her first semester at the prestigious Dupont University. A young high school graduate from a poverty-stricken rural town, her intelligence and hard work at school have been rewarded with a full scholarship to the prestigious college of Dupont.
As Charlotte prepares to say goodbye to her family and enter the big city world of college, an event happens at Dupont University that will play an important role during the course of the novel. Hoyt Thorpe, member of the exclusive and powerful fraternity Saint Ray, and a fellow fraternity brother Vance stumble upon an unnamed California governor (who was at the college to speak at the school's commencement ceremony) receiving oral sex from a female college student. When the governor's body guard spots the two fraternity members, a fight ensues with Hoyt and Vance beating up the bodyguard and fleeing. The story of the night (called “The Night of the Skullfuck”) soon spreads across campus, increasing Hoyt's popularity as a Godlike fratboy on campus.
Soon fall arrives, as Charlotte arrives on campus to begin college. Her roommate is a wealthy young woman named Beverly, obsessed with sex and in particular, having sex with the members of the school's predominantly white lacrosse team.
Elsewhere on the college, two additional characters are introduced: Jojo Johanssen, a white athlete on the college's predominantly black basketball team. The team's coach is struggling to keep his position, having recently recruited an up-and-coming black freshman player, and wants to bench Jojo in his junior year to make way for his new player. Despite his falling stock in the eyes of his coach, Jojo still commands a level of popularity on campus and enjoys the spoils of being a college athlete, in terms of using the school's tutor program to force other students to complete his school assignments for him. Jojo's “tutor” Adam Gellin is then introduced. Like Charlotte, Gellin comes from a working class background; Gellin writes for the college's independent newspaper and is a member of the “Millennial Mutants”, a group of like-minded intellectuals who oppose the anti-intellectualism and class snobbery they see in their fellow students.
As Charlotte adjusts to college life, she finds herself dealing with the sexual temptations of college life, culminating in her hooking up with Hoyt, who tells Charlotte of catching California's governor being blown by a college girl. He also tells Charlotte of Adam Gellin, who has begun investigating the rumors of the incident and how as a result of it, a large Wall Street firm (on the behest of the governor) has offered a high-paying entry level job to Hoyt, in exchange for his silence about the incident.
However, Hoyt's relationship with Charlotte takes a severe turn when the two attend an important fraternity formal together; after the formal, Hoyt takes full advantage of a drunken Charlotte, seducing her into giving up her virginity to him. The following morning, Charlotte is soundly dumped by Hoyt. She is further humiliated and driven into the ground mentally when she returns to campus and discovers that Hoyt's seduction and rejection has been made public via two girls Charlotte had previously befriended. The two cruelly mock Charlotte, both over her poverty-stricken background and for the way that she drunkenly lost her virginity to the notorious womanizer Hoyt. This drives Charlotte into a severe depression and eventually into the arms of Adam, who has wanted and loved Charlotte for her beauty, innocence and status as an intellectual since they first met. With the help of Adam's care and perseverance, Charlotte finally emerges from her depression and rejoins the world, finding that she has received terrible grades (B, B-, C-, D) for her first semester at Dupont.
As Adam prepares to publish his article, his world collides with Jojo Johanssen's, as a paper that Adam wrote for Jojo is accused of being plagiarized. This leads Jojo, who treats Adam as being beneath him socially, to deny the plagiarism charge and protect Adam from being exposed as the person writing the paper, or else expose the athletic department's perversion of the athlete/tutor program in terms of making the tutors do the homework for the assorted jocks at the college. At the same time, Jojo has begun to transform himself academically, from a stereotypical "dumb jock" into a student who takes his academics seriously and even develops an interest in philosophy (partly as a result of the influence of Charlotte, whom he has met several times during the course of the book). Jerome Quat (Jojo's professor) confronts Adam about the plagiarized paper and shows sympathy towards him and his status as an intellectual in a college dominated by sex and sports-obsessed students. However, when Adam confesses to writing the paper for Jojo, the professor double-crosses Adam by telling him that he will gladly sacrifice Adam in order to bring down the basketball program, which has circled the wagon to protect Jojo.
This devastates Adam, causing him to break down and have to have Charlotte take care of him as he waits for the professor to formally charge him and Jojo for cheating. In the meantime, Adam's full article on “The Night of the Skullfuck” is published. The story and its sordid details of sex, violence, bribery, and a high profile political figure causes it to be picked up by local press and ultimately, the national media. The governor's career is ruined, and the job offer/bribe made to Hoyt is revoked, effectively shattering Hoyt's life, as he now finds himself being forced to count down to a post-graduation judgment day, with his family's life saving exhausted in order to pay for his college education and a college transcript with such bad grades that will effectively keep him from gaining a job as an investment banker. Both Jojo and Adam's necks are saved, as the liberal college professor decides to drop the entire plagiarism complaint against the two men so as to avoid undercutting Adam's credibility in destroying the conservative governor's political career.
Adam's self-esteem restored, he begins to bask in the glow of the media as they swarm around him to talk to the man who brought down a state governor. Adam and Charlotte begin to drift apart, and Charlotte begins to date Jojo. Charlotte provides a good influence on the basketball player, causing him to keep his position as starter on the team. As the book ends, Charlotte has ascended to the envied position of girlfriend of the college's star basketball player. Charlotte now reflects upon her first semester with an elitist view, looking down at her former friends and Hoyt, who casually threw her away at the cost of his own future. The only person she had a favorable opinion of was Adam, who she had not seen since his big story broke. The novel ends with Charlotte admitting finally that her intellectualism is not what is most important to her — rather it is being that special person that is recognized as special, regardless of the reason. The fame of being a girlfriend to the basketball team's star player suits her well, as she cheers Jojo on from the faculty section of the stands at one of his games.
[edit] Major themes
The book develops themes Wolfe introduces in the title essay from his book Hooking Up. The novel centers on Charlotte, a naive new student at Dupont University, a school boasting a top-ranked basketball program and an Ivy League academic reputation. Despite Dupont's elite status, in the minds of its students, sex, alcohol, and social status rule the day. The student culture is focused upon gaining material wealth, physical pleasure and a well-placed social status; academics are only important insofar as they help achieve these goals.
[edit] Research
The school discussed in the book appears to be an amalgamation of several elite universities. Wolfe denies that the book is fully based on Duke, from which his daughter Alexandra graduated in 2002. For instance, "St. Ray's" fraternity in the book is allegedly loosely modeled after the Delta chapter of St. Anthony Hall—a fraternity often referred to as "St. A's"—at the University of Pennsylvania. In researching for Simmons, Wolfe attended a cocktail party hosted by the fraternity, known for its elitism and secrecy, in 2001. Even the locations of the "St. Ray's" house and the St. A's house are similar, the former located on fictional "Ladding Walk," while the latter resides on Penn's Locust Walk.[1]
The basketball star, Jojo Johanssen, is a jock/celebrity stock character, derived from colleges like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Kentucky, Duke, Stanford, Indiana University and the University of Florida, where, in Wolfe's perception, student athletes are treated as superior.
There is also a reference in the book to a freshman dormitory "Giles", which is an actual freshman dorm at Duke University.
[edit] Reviews
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The novel met with a mostly tepid critical response. It won the London-based Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award, an "honor" established "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel." Wolfe later explained that such sexual references were deliberate. Defenders of the book state that most of the sex scenes, at least those involving Charlotte, were send-ups of her sexual naiveté and incredible knowledge of biology and anatomy.
[edit] References
- Guardian Unlimited Books - Wolfe novel to be filmed
- Wolfe, Tom. I am Charlotte Simmons ISBN 0-374-28158-0.
[edit] External links
- Slate Book Club review
- The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: 'Moral Suicide,' à la Wolfe, The New York Times, November 16, 2004
- "Sex & Scandal at Duke" Rolling Stone article that covers many of the same themes as Wolfe's novel
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