Tom Wolfe's thinly veiled portrait of life at Duke
Note (a rather long one): After I wrote this piece, Tom Wolfe wrote a 3000 plus word denial and personal attack in an obscure Duke publication (now defunct). I felt flattered. I thought that he saved that kind of vitriol for big shots like Norman Mailer and John Updike. I was in great company. There's one thing I'd like to clear up, though: he implied that I wrote this piece because I was angry that he didn't give me a blurb for a book jacket. Baloney.
Tom Wolfe had a pre-publication copy of my book, Gone for Good. Out of the blue, he called me to ask some questions about the book and told me how much he liked it. He was in the middle of writing a novel about higher education, he said.
I told my editor that Tom Wolfe called. She asked me to ask him for a blurb. I called Tom Wolfe back. He said no to my request. He said he thought the book would create a "donnybrook at Duke" (his words, not mine). His daughter was a Duke student and he promised her that he would do nothing to make her life difficult there. I said I didn't think a donnybrook would take place, but I understood his reticence since I had a college-age daughter myself. Our conversation ended amicably.
Copyright 2004 The Durham Herald Co. - The Herald-Sun (Durham, NC)- November 21, 2004 Sunday Final Edition- SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A13 LENGTH: 1064 words HEADLINE: Tom Wolfe's thinly veiled portrait of life at Duke BYLINE: STUART ROJSTACZER Guest columnist
With the publication of "I Am Charlotte Simmons," Tom Wolfe has now written three novels. The first two have sold millions of copies. The third has an advance printing of 1.5 million. Placed end to end, these new books would reach from the Long Island home of Tom Wolfe to about half way to Duke. And while Tom Wolfe, out of Southern politeness, dismisses any suggestion that the fictional university in "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is modeled on Duke, everyone, including Tom Wolfe, knows better.
Let us count the ways Wolfe's Dupont University is Duke-like:
* Prestigious private university? Check.
* About 6,000 undergraduates? Check.
* Located next to a slum? Check.
* Fraternities and sororities dominate social life? Check.
* Drinking and hook up culture pass for entertainment? Check (Well that's virtually everywhere, but Duke certainly doesn't buck the trend).
* Lead character is a talented Tar Heel native who is surrounded by wealthy Yankee students? Check.
* Freshmen are in dorms isolated from the upper class students? Check.
* Basketball reigns supreme? Check.
* Basketball players drive leased SUVs as a result of booster club connections? Check.
* Basketball players live in dorms where walls have been knocked down to make them bigger and communal? Check.
* Basketball players have tutors who do more than tutor and actually do some homework? Probably.
* Basketball team has one white player who starts and goes by the name Jojo? Close, it's JJ.
* Basketball coach is a talented megalomaniac who swears like a sailor? Check.
* Basketball coach's office rests high above everyone in a tower? Check.
OK, enough about basketball and similarities. The fact is that Wolfe's DuPont University looks like Duke, smells like Duke and acts like Duke. So it's Duke with the cosmetic difference that it's located near Philadelphia and it has 21 Nobel Prize winners (sadly Duke has zero, but that will change with time no doubt). Now that we know that DuPont is Duke, I'll just call Wolfe's fictional university Duke from here on in.
Fall from grace.
What takes place at Duke in Wolfe's novel is the Madame Bovary/Anna Karenina-like moral decline of a brilliant 18-year-old freshman, Charlotte Simmons. The novel isn't particularly interesting as novels go.
Wolfe is best when his cynical eye details the fall of the mighty as his other two novels have done. But here, watching a sweet little 18-year-old Tar Heel fall from grace in a cynical and detached way isn't what I'd call captivating literature. Then there is the plot, which is thin at best, driven by some oral sex on the campus quadrangle late at night.
Sex dominates
There's plenty of sex in the novel. My guess is that out of the 670 odd-some pages, over 500 deal with sex, either searching for it, longing for it, thinking about it, or having it. The central thesis in this book about college life at Duke is that sex so dominates undergraduate culture that there is room for little else, including the "life of the mind."
It's a good thesis as theses go. Wolfe uses his characters to examine this thesis in detail. And his characters are not the wide-spectrum of students at Duke. They are a slice of Duke life. In Wolfe's Duke, we don't see the eager pre-meds, the granolas, the engineers, the students who want to go on to graduate school and become academics, the just plain serious students, and those who go to the Chapel every Sunday. In fact, none of the student characters in Wolfe's Duke are in any way decent human beings.
Vain and gorgeous
Tom Wolfe focuses on the "pond scum" of Duke's campus. Dumb racist jocks, misogynistic frat boys, submissive/catty sorority girls, and arrogant and insecure academic achievers inhabit Wolfe's Duke. Wolfe's characters are vain, obsessed with status, and while generally gorgeous on the outside, are very ugly on the inside. The central character doesn't start out that way, but by the end of the novel she certainly fits the mold.- -¬Ý-- How real is Wolfe's Duke? For that slice of the Duke undergraduate body that is represented by Wolfe, I'd say it's very real. I've been at Duke for 14 years now. This is my last year. Every year for the last several years, I've gone on a week-long field trip with Duke students. I've gotten to know Duke students pretty damn well. And about 30 percent of them bear an uncanny resemblance to Wolfe's Duke. The language that they use fits Wolfe's dialogue to a T. The ugly attitudes expressed by them in conversation fit the attitudes described by Wolfe. Wolfe's Duke is a dead on accurate description of about one-third of Duke's student population.
Good students missing
But what about the other two-thirds? Included in that two-thirds are decent human beings. Included in that two-thirds are students who care about the classes they take. Included in that two-thirds are some students I've gotten to know and admire. They are nowhere to be found in Wolfe's novel. And their absence makes "I Am Charlotte Simmons" a book that, while rich in pyrotechnic prose, is poor in execution of its ideas and lacks nuance. Wolfe in interviews has indicated that in "I Am Charlotte Simmons" he had no interest in writing a polemic about the immoral state of universities. He has stated that in writing this book he was interested in entertaining, first and foremost. For this reader, there is little entertainment value in reading 670 pages about narcissists obsessing about sex and status. Like Wolfe's disavowals that his fictional university isn't Duke, it is clear that this novel is indeed a polemic and not an entertainment.
True ... to a point
That said, all of the raunchiness and bad behavior in this novel are a true to life slice of a good part of Duke University. Tom Wolfe has put a mirror to a good portion of undergraduate life at Duke University and the image in that mirror is an ugly one.
Wolfe's book will come and go. University leaders will, when asked, dismiss its accurate portrayals of the bleak world of college life. Parents will likely try to ignore it as well. Few parents want to be told that they are spending upwards of $40,000 a year to send their child to Sodom. But the fact is that if we do not respond to the ugly picture we see in the mirror, we will continue to turn our backs to the education of many of our best and brightest. To my mind, that would be a tragedy.
Stuart Rojstaczer is a professor of geology, environment and engineering at Duke.
GRAPHIC: THE HERALD-SUN | FILE PHOTO BY KEVIN SEIFERT Tom Wolfe's new novel stereotypes only the worst in college student behavior and ignores those who are sober, studious and involved. Above, Duke students build a snowman at Duke Chapel in 2002. THE HERALD-SUN | FILE PHOTO BY BILL WILLCOX Wolfe speaks at Duke University's commencement in 2002.