Howling Wolfe, Toothless Story

There used to be a time when Tom Wolfe was The Man.a rambunctious.swashbuckling.iconoclastic.Young Turk!!.who took on the New Yorker, William Shawn's temple of the gods, for Chrissake.with.irony.and wit.ohmygod HE WAS SO FREAKING GOOD!

He liberated pallid.shrinking.ellipses from the clutches of linguafrankly challenged Romance Writers. He used CAPITALs and broke letters right in the middle of a sentence just so that he could, you know, convey the Truth in its shining glory.

He administered the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, mau-maued the flakcatchers, set a torch to the bonfire of the vanities. Oh yeah. He was the man. In full.

Then four years ago, his writerly instincts told him that college campuses were steaming petridishes hosting subcultures that had been unfairly ignored by the Great American Writer as a species. Now Wolfe, he knows subcultures.

He practically invented the word. So he spent four whole years hanging out with the basketball squad, relearning jargon, meditating on the endless possibilities of the f-word as verb, noun and general conversational comma, diligently attending frat parties.

Of course he dressed for the part. He wore a blazer and casual jeans. There is no length to which the man will not go in pursuit of his calling.

The result, served up as tenderly as a quivering cheerleader to a triumphant football team, is I Am Charlotte Simmons, a novel that will change your perspective on college campuses in the land of the free by revealing certain terrifying truths.

Such as: jocks rule, students party, some drugs happen, much promiscuous sex happens, and no one cares about Learning.

It's mindboggling to think that we knew none of this before Tom Wolfe enlightened us; no, we were clearly naïve enough to believe that colleges were temples of wisdom, that students would never, ever use bad language, or-gasp!-smoke, or-I need an ellipses, but Wolfe stole the lot when he wrote the book-screw around.

The plot, such as it is, is straight out of Richardson's Pamela, marginally updated for the 20th century. Meet Charlotte Simmons, though you're going to wish you hadn't.

Simmons, freshfaced, beautiful in the manner of a shampoo ad, comes from North Carolina and is a paragon of virtue.

She has never gone all the way, given it up, made the two-backed beast; she appears to have gone through life without noticing her hormones; she is earnest, committed to her studies, and""what more proof could you ask of innocence?""a makeup virgin who knows nothing of the dark world of eyeshadow, blusher and Diesel jeans.

Wolfe may know his college campuses backwards and forwards, but he doesn't seem to know what authors from Agatha Christie to Annie Proulx are aware of-if you really want to know sin, find yourself a small town.

Charlotte's roommate, Beverly, is a social x-ray rescued from a Bonfire of the Vanities outtake. She is here to lower our heroine's morale so that she can whisper her mantra"""I am Charlotte Simmons"""in tones of increasing desperation, and also to underline another great Wolfeian insight.

Women (barring the lesbians, but who cares about them? Not Wolfe) go to college to land rich husbands; men go to college to land good jobs on the higher end of the business ladder.

But, in an utterly stunning plot twist, the young Charlotte survives the bleak house of ostracism by attracting the attention of three sterling young men.

Jojo Johanssen is the only white player on the all-black basketball team. He must choose between the lure of the courts, SUVs and fat contracts""and Charlotte's purer siren call, which beckons him to explore the life of the mind.

He is so inspired by our heroine, in fact, that he takes an advanced philosophy class; the struggle between Socrates and hoop shots was never so poignant.

Hoyt Thorpe is the reigning campus god, king of the frathouse, so gorgeous that the campus hotties are happy to ignore the fact that he has fewer morals than the average tomcat.

He's the one who tests Charlotte's virtue, and in what is actually one of the better-drawn passages in the book, our heroine proves unequal to the lures of booze and hazel eyes at an out-of-town frat party.

Deflowered by a man unworthy of her, she finds solace in the company of the campus ubergeek, Adam Geller, who has strength, principles, and usefully, the inside dirt on Hoyt.

Among all these tangled threads of passion, one skein will catch your attention: the love affair between Hoyt Thorpe and Hoyt Thorpe is one of the most poignant in history.

The central thesis that Wolfe employs to shore up this sorry edifice of the obvious and the trite is borrowed from a Nobel Prize winner's experiments.

Victor Ransome Starling removed the amygdala from a group of cats, to discover that this sent them into "a state of sexual arousal hypermanic in the extreme".

Over time, a normal group of cats, the control group, with their amygdalas intact, began to behave with the same ruttishness as their surgically altered counterparts.

Starling picked up the Nobel for his discovery of what was called "cultural para-stimuli"""normal animal responses could be overwhelmed if the prevailing social or cultural atmosphere was strong enough.

It's quite an insight, and it might have worked better if Wolfe had been less overwhelmed by his research. His characters could have come out of the world of TV soaps and college-dorm flicks: the geek, the beauty, the schemer, the jock, the campus god.

His insights are equally banal: the new racism ensures that blacks and jocks aren't allowed a life out of the sporting arena, geeks are discriminated against, everyone thinks way too much of the urban tribal warfare we know as sports, and hey, did he mention that college kids are very, very horny?

He did, and his efforts have not gone unrewarded: just this week, I Am Charlotte Simmons picked up the annual Bad Sex in writing prize. With lines like "Slither slither slither went the tongue", the judges said it was the hands-down winner, no questions asked.

I Am Charlotte Simmons

Tom Wolfe
Jonathan Cape,
distributed by Rupa & Co
Pages: 676;
Price: £9.75