The Right Stuff

The hefty new book on President Bush’s reading list reinforces conservative nightmares about college.

By Jon Baskin

Earlier this month, the New York Times’s Elizabeth Bumiller dug up a dirty secret about President Bush’s reading list: the president, she said, was knee deep in “Tom Wolfe’s racy new beer- and sex-soaked novel, ‘I am Charlotte Simmons.’” Bumiller wondered why the president was so excited by Wolfe’s novel. “Does Bush like the book because it is a journey back to his keg nights at Deke,” she asked, “or because it offers a glimpse into the world of his daughters’ generation? Or does he like the writing?”

The answer, I would guess, is none of the above. The president probably liked the book because, despite its “racy:” exterior, “I am Charlotte Simmons” has a mushy, conservative core, corresponding quite nicely to the president’s own values and worldview. In fact, Bush was far from the first prominent conservative to endorse the book. Book critics greeted Wolfe’s college chronicle with a series of negative, sometimes spiteful reviews, but “I am Charlotte Simmons” found a staunch defender in conservative columnist David Brooks. “I don’t agree with all of Wolfe’s depiction of campus life,” Brooks wrote, “but he’s located one of the paradoxes of the age. Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone.”

An always avid evaluator of his own reviews, Wolfe fastened himself to Brooks’s interpretation: “I didn’t start the book with that in mind,” he said, “but that is precisely what comes out of the material. I was very grateful to David Brooks. I felt like, gee, he must be the only reader who gets it.”

Readers of Wolfe’s early journalistic work – especially Pump House Gang (1965) and Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), may think of Wolfe as an essentially progressive sensibility. But increasingly, in recent years, the man in the white suit has had to depend on conservative commentators for understanding. In “Hooking Up,” a stodgy book of essays Wolfe published to celebrate the millennium, he tried to prove that America’s liberal elite – a few of whom reviewed his “A Man in Full” poorly – simply didn’t understand the “revolution in content” that his novels heralded.

But that wasn’t true then and it’s not true now. In the case of “I am Charlotte Simmons,” the problem is not that no one (besides Brooks and Bush) got the book. They just didn’t like what they got. This includes Wolfe’s creeping conservatism, which bursts full bloom into the ideological substructure of the novel. The book’s 676 pages can be disappointingly boiled down to a message we’ve heard from a thousand other sources since election day: Sex: Bad, Moral Values: Good.

The College Scene, Ala Wolfe

“I am Charlotte Simmons” begins with the proposition that college students resemble animals in heat, literally. In a two-page prelude that precedes the story, Wolfe describes a scientific experiment whereby a “control” cat is turned into a sexual maniac after watching from his cage as 30 amygdalectomized cats – that is, cats whose brains had been physically altered so they are thrown into a “hypermanic” state of sexual arousal – copulate wildly on the floor in front of him.

In Wolfe’s novel, the virginal prodigy Charlotte Simmons is the control cat. She arrives at Dupont – the fictional college Wolfe cooks up from two parts Princeton and one part Duke – unprepared by her evangelical upbringing in rural North Carolina for the lurid sex and sports crazed environment of the 21st century University. But despite her shabby clothes, moral outrage and (to readers at least) extremely annoying personality, Charlotte soon finds herself pursued by three men: Hoyt, the wildly popular frat boy; Jojo, the basketball star; and Adam, the nerdy intellectual.

Following 500 sluggish pages of inch-by-inch moral slippage, Charlotte allows Hoyt to pilfer her virginity on a hotel bed at a fraternity formal. The novel’s, ahem…climax (for which Wolfe won the Literary Review’s prestigious “Bad Sex Award”), is carried off with arcade-like sound affects: “The big thing was stuffed into her innards – her very innards! and insult upon insult! – moving – in, out, in, out…His pace started to quicken. Rut rut rut rut rut her body shook shook shook shook shook and bounced bounced bounced bounced bounced from his jolt jolt jolt jolt jolt…” (481).

Afterwards, Hoyt retreats to his fraternity den while Charlotte sinks headlong into a black pit of depression. Her self-flagellation wears on for most of the novel’s final 200 pages. She is “shamed,” “worthless,” “cowardly,” “fallen,” “debauched.” She fails classes, lies to her mother and forgets to buy Christmas gifts for her brothers. Only in the final chapter is Charlotte redeemed, partially, by her chaste attachment to Jojo, who, improbably inspired by Charlotte’s moral earnestness, has apparently gotten over his sweet tooth for slutty groupies.

Wolfe’s novel, like the book of essays that preceded it, is sprinkled with diatribes against anti-American professors, observations about youth culture’s disdain for “morality,” and consternation at the pushing of what are implied to be liberal theories (like evolution) as academic scripture. But there is no more strident argument than the plot itself, which posits casual sex with a frat boy, un-ironically, as a literally life shattering experience.

Wolfe is a journalist at heart and he likes to pretend the “ideas” in his work simply “come out of the material” he observes. But he is in fact a remarkably judgmental writer; it’s always easy to tell when Wolfe likes his subjects (e.g. The Merry Pranksters in Electric Cool Aid Acid Test) and when he dislikes them (e.g. rich women who go to New York parties in Bonfire of the Vanities). His observations are rarely neutral.

The sense you get as you read through “I Am Charlotte Simmons” is that the material came out of the argument, not – as Wolfe claims – the other way around. Wolfe seems to have decided against the elite university long before he observed a thing.

Higher Values

It is instructive to look at how Brooks interprets Charlotte’s journey: “Wolfe describes a society in which we still have vague notions about good and bad, virtue and vice, but the moral substructure that fits all those concepts together has been washed away,” Brooks writes. “Everybody is left swirling about in a chaotic rush of desire and action, without a coherent code to make sense of it all.” Charlotte’s problem, in Brooks’s reading, is the lack of a “coherent code” to make sense of college life.

The solution to this problem is simple, according to Brooks and Wolfe. Colleges need to teach moral values. The lurid network of rap lyrics, blockbuster films and video games that apparently undergird the student experience in “I am Charlotte Simmons” is no replacement for good old-fashioned values instruction. This is not an outrageous suggestion, nor a limitedly conservative one (in 2004, former Harvard president Derek Bok led a consortium of college administrators to consider the question), but it is much more complicated than it appears.

The problem isn’t simply that adults on college campuses have abdicated responsibility. The problem is that forging one “coherent code” out of the diverse group of codes that inhabit the 21st century college would be an inherently discriminatory act. Chicago University professor Stanley Fish, who has argued extensively against the importation of values onto campuses, notes “universities could engage in moral and civic education only by deciding in advance which of the competing views of morality and citizenship is the right one, and then devoting academic resources and energy to the task of realizing it.”

For Wolfe, the scourges of college life include moral relativity, casual atheism, materialism and sexual chaos. It’s clear at a glance that these issues won’t be addressed by just any values: they require conservative values. The subtext of “I am Charlotte Simmons” is not really, as Brooks suggests, that colleges aren’t “building character” – it’s that they’re building the wrong kind of character. Wolfe knows not just any “code” will do. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, he spells it out: “you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a God who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says ‘Thou shalt’ or ‘Thou shalt not.’” Rules and codes are ineffective unless they “have the force of righteousness, which is to say God, behind them.”

But, at least since the nineteenth century, when most universities were religious institutions, colleges don’t have “the force of righteousness” behind them. It is the nature of the institution itself, not derelict professors or administrators, which argues against offering a “coherent code” regarding values. The function of the modern university, as Fish has pointed out, is the pursuit of truth and its distribution to students. The “force of righteousness” is supplanted by the force of reason. Such an institution is as qualified to instruct young people in morals as the church is to instruct them in science.

Tom Wolfe and the Values Voter

In her New York Times review of “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” Mihiko Kakutani takes Wolfe to task for failing to “tackle the zeitgeist” or “lasso…the ineluctable feel of a decade – as he did in [his] earlier books.” But Kakutani is mistaken. With “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” Wolfe is just as in touch with the “zeitgeist” as ever. After all, what could be more appropriate, in the year of the “values voter”, than a novel that skewers elites for their academic pretensions and posits casual sex as a potentially life-ruining moral scourge among young people?

Fittingly, in a Guardian interview published on election eve, Wolfe attacked East coast intellectuals (otherwise known as his readers) for “trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality.” Like his protagonist Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe positioned himself with Bush supporters, “against the mainstream, morally speaking.”

But “I Am Charlotte Simmons” is actually with the mainstream, “morally speaking,” and that’s what makes it so dull. Wolfe’s trick in previous work was to depict the “zeitgeist” without joining it. In Bonfire of the Vanities, he savaged the “greed is good” culture of the 80s. And in A Man in Full, Wolfe lanced the bloated underbelly of the pre-Enron late 90s business world. Even “Hooking Up,” published in 2000, had a Clintonized, pre-9/11 America to kick around with culturally conservative invective.

But in his latest novel, Wolfe has made a miscalculation. He clearly thinks Charlotte is charmingly anti-establishment, but Charlotte’s Evangelical moralism will just remind readers of the values voters that swept President Bush to his second term on November 3rd. The novel is published into a country where secularism is on the run. Sexual freedom, postmodernism, political correctness, popular culture – all the bugaboos Wolfe targets are paper giants, denounced by our most popular media personalities (Limbaugh, Stern, Hannity, O’Reilly) and major institutions (the Church, the Army, the Senate). People who believe in them remain in the majority on college campuses, but it is their beliefs, not Charlotte’s Evangelicalism, which run upstream against the broader currents of our historical moment.

The problem with “I am Charlotte Simmons” is that Wolfe does “tackle” the zeitgeist. Then he gives it a big, wet kiss.

Jonathan Baskin, 24, is a writer for the Center for American Progress. He graduated from Brown University in 2003.