Too freakin’ much! At the ripe old age of 74, journalist turned novelist Tom Wolfe has scored a slam dunk with his new novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (FSG, $28.95), which has more life in it than a sold-out basketball stadium watching a Big Four final.
While his detractors, were spending the last six years wondering aloud what was going on with Wolfe’s so-called “campus”” book, the author was busy going back to school. He stepped figuratively into a pair of low-riding Diesel jeans and learned the nuances of a new generation.”Charlotte Simmons” is the story of a brilliant girl from the poor but proud Blue Ridge Mountains who wins a scholarship to the Ivy League, basketball-obsessed Dupont University.
Roomed with an anorexic, fashion-mad brat, and eventually wooed by two of the top “playahs” on campus, Charlotte’s caught in a battle for her soul. Will she abide her parents’ God-fearing principles or let the Devil put her in Prada?
Fans of Wolfe will recognize the attention to style, the rule-bending punctuation, the deftness of dialogue (particularly slang) and the biting satire that somehow makes these 676 pages turn like a Red Eye read.
In the “Age of the Wuss,” as Wolfe calls it here, the author is in fighting form, in low- and highbrow mode. Here, neuroscience and “Pantagruelian” share space with hip-hoppers who rhyme “testicle” with “Popsicle.”
On the day President Bush was re-elected, we land-lined the Man in the White Suit at home on the Upper East Side, to discuss sex, elections and the state of the cell-phone generation.
You spent more than two years interviewing students and professors, from Stanford and Duke to Gainesville and Michigan. How would you describe the political interest of students at these places of higher learning?
I’d say the interest was negligible. It was apathetic at best.
Much is being made of the fact that liberal New York, post-election, has a walking-dead aura to it. Is The End near?
There were so many articles saying that this election represented Armageddon, a biblical term that means the final battle of Good and Evil. (Laughs) This was to be the Final Fight. No American election, at least during my lifetime, has been of that magnitude. It is hard to make a truly radical move in the United States. This is a centrist country.
Was it surprising to you that the same amount of cell-phone generation voters turned out for this election as for the prior one?
My impression is that the media doesn’t consider all youth in their collective reporting. They think of the Northeastern, politically sensitive students. What they don’t see is that a lot of the students – outside New York and Los Angeles – are going to be conservative. Not everyone going out to see “Friday Night Lights” is going to vote for Kerry.
Not so long ago, you riled Norman Mailer, John Updike and weirdly, John Irving, with some of your views on the future of the novel – that its only means of survival is detailed realism. What do you think they”ll say about “Charlotte Simmons”?
I would be surprised if Mailer or Updike took any notice. Irving, though, for some reason, now seems to have a disease – a form of Lupus. As an experiment, you should call him up and tell him that I think that he wasted most of his career by not going into the country and using his talents to really see American people, and come back and interpret all the details of American life. He’s not so old that he can’t function. Get off the farm, I say. The response you will get is 30 seconds of sputtering, then blurting out the naughtiest words he can summon up through his brain stem. I was so surprised when I saw him go berserk about me on Canadian television. He was saying, “This f—ing guy! You can’t teach that f—ing s— to a freshman English class!” It was a fit. Why, I don’t know. I don’t have a history with him. I have never met him. I have never written about him.
Rap music plays a major role in the book. Dawg, how’d a white-linen guy like you get down with the homeboys so comfortably?
The people at the publishing house kept coming to me and saying that it was dicey to use, to sample, even to quote, a couple (rap lyrics). It costs a lot of money, and you’ll pay dearly. When I told them that I wrote all the lyrics and made up the performers, they couldn’t believe it. I just took these songs and pushed them not so much over the top. (Laughs) I had a lot of fun doing it.
How did you dress for your return to academia?
I would never come to an interview in a white suit. That’s showboating. And calling attention upon me, which is not something I would want to do. Not that I could ever fit in. I wore a navy blazer and a tie, the latter which alone would make one stand apart. I’ve found over the years that I fit in to so few of my settings that I just take the Man from Mars approach. Like, I just got in from Mars and I don’t know anything, or what you are doing – please inform me.
Failing upward and survival of the dimwitted seem to be the Zeitgeist right now. Any thoughts on this? Or cases in point?
Take Paris Hilton. A novelist could have thought up the pornographic videotape and the big TV contract. But I don’t think a novelist could have thought up what actually happened: She got the big TV contract because of the porn tape! That is the key lesson from this. She was just a boldface name who occasionally did something goofy before the porn video.
Can you go home again, or is there no place like home, in terms of the book?
It’s really, “You can’t go home again,” once Charlotte has had a taste of this other life. She makes what readers will hopefully feel is a wrong decision. Even if she had made the right decision, she still couldn’t go home again. Some will likely think, “Wow! She came out great!” But, ultimately, she ends up arm candy.
Steve Garbarino is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and TV Guide.