An American Wolfe on campus

By JOHN FREEMAN

Sitting cross-legged on a plush gold couch in the library of his Upper East Side apartment, wearing the trademark white suite, navy tie, and spotless two-tone spats, Tom Wolfe is about as far from a college keg party as one can be in the United States.

On the table before him stands a small statuette of Chairman Mao. The walls around us support shelf after shelf of books on Flemish masters and folios of modern painters, portraits of Wolfe's daughter in full equestrian gear.

Visit Wolfe in this setting and it becomes easy to understand why life on American university campuses was a distant reality for him. And a shocking one, too. Indeed, his 700-page new novel, I am Charlotte Simmons reads like every father's worst nightmare. Set in fictional DuPont University, it reaches down into America's deep-fried soul and returns with an inflammatory portrait of the pornographic hollowness of that $120,000 investment otherwise known as college: all the drinking and the partying, the video-game playing, test cheating, wanton screwing and athlete worshipping.

Even Wolfe, who has travelled with Ken Kesey, attended Nascar races, hung out with Black Panthers and made millions by telling us what the madding crowd is doing, acknowledges America's youth may have slipped a little: "I'm glad I didn't know this before my kids went off to college," he says with an uneasy smile.

It's an odd statement for America's pre-eminent clocker of the zeitgeist to make. As if we needed a reminder of how, well, pre-September 11 seem such concerns over life on college campuses, the view out of Wolfe's library stretches all the way to the former site of the World Trade Centre.

I ask him whether he may have mistimed his target, if, perhaps the zeitgeist passed him by this time.

"I did pause and say, you know, wait a minute," says Wolfe with the languid cadence of a born southerner. "This is supposedly changing everything. But look at New York today? Real estate is out of control.

"Besides I found on campuses the reaction to September 11 was zero."

Why do they hate us? Who are they? Osama bin who? These are the questions Americans asked after September 11, and if you believe Wolfe's portrait in I am Charlotte Simmons, even American college students didn't pause to long to ponder the answers. Using his usual brilliant interior monologues, Wolfe reveals that kids are ignorant and have remained so because they have one thing on their minds: sex.

Critics have already pointed out that Wolfe's decision to write a female lead might be a response to those who carped, among other things, that he could not make a woman come alive on the page. Wolfe disagrees.

"I finally decided on Charlotte because her simple naivety is a good way to introduce the reader to this campus life, so every revelation to Charlotte Simmons is supposed to be a revelation to the reader. Also, from what I had seen, the changes in terms of sexuality are much harder on a woman than a man."

Tom Wolfe as a feminist? Indeed, the action that follows reads like a literary dramatisation of the themes and observations contained in Wolfe's essay, Hooking Up, in which he noted that by the year 2000 sexual stimuli bombarded the young so incessantly and intensely they were inflamed with a randy itch long before reaching puberty.

Life at DuPont shows what happens when these hyper-sexed teens reach college age. Within a day of her arrival, Charlotte is "sexiled" from her room when her roommate brings a young man home for sex; fraternity brothers engage in stop-watched contests to see how quickly they can bed fresh meat.

All this could be written off as melodrama were Wolfe not so thorough about his research. He visited more than a dozen college campuses over four years. He talked to students and attended classes, and, just a few years after having quintuple bypass surgery, stayed out until four or five in the morning, standing in the corner of fraternity house basements with ears pricked. No notepads.

Although he never observed sexual congress, as he puts it, Wolfe did see plenty of dirty dancing and became so fluent in what he called the f ... patois — in which the expletive is used as a noun, verb and adjective — that he could speak it himself.

A novel by Wolfe has become a kind of once-a-decade event in American publishing and is greeted with the kind of polarised fanfare characteristic of an industry fighting over fewer and fewer spoils.

If the sales of Bonfire of the Vanities thrust Wolfe to the top of the heap of America's social novelists, A Man in Full, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, gave Wolfe's critics a thorn in their side.

Reviewing the book in the New Yorker, John Updike wrote that it was entertainment, not literature.

The food fight over Charlotte Simmons has already begun. In the New York Sun, Adam Kirsch argued that Wolfe has never been able to discover the deeper, stranger, more elusive truths that fiction can bring. The New York Times' Charles McGrath responded with a profile that compared Wolfe to other American masters who graduated from the newsroom to the novel: John O'Hara and Stephen Crane.

Wolfe seems to have known I am Charlotte Simmons would be greeted with a certain savagery, and he's begun his new essay, his response perhaps.

"I've begun working on a writers' hippocratic oath," Wolfe says. "The first line of the doctors' hippocratic oath is 'First, do no harm'. And I think for the writers it would be: 'First, entertain'.

"Entertain is a very simple word. I looked it up in the dictionary. Entertainment enables people to pass the time pleasantly. And any writing — I don't care if it's poetry or what — should first entertain. It's a very recent thing that there's a premium put on making writing so difficult that only a charming aristocracy is capable of understanding it."

* John Freeman is a writer in New York

I Am Charlotte Simmons is released in New Zealand on November 19 (rrp $54.95)