If Tom Wolfe’s latest novel, I am Charlotte Simmons (2004), is not as good as his first two, it is not due to sloppy writing or a wit too prone to caricature, but because he fails to engage with his eponymous protagonist— the novel’s title is a promise Wolfe fails to keep. His failure is not on his reviewers’ terms, but on his own. Th e fi ctional universes he has created in each novel correspond so closely that one can conclude that for Wolfe, every human interaction is a status consideration and secondly, that every human interaction is a potentially mortifying one. Th e problem is that Wolfe is interested in male humiliation far more than he is in the forms that female humiliation takes.

This claim is unusual, because all the reviews of I am Charlotte Simmons so far have taken up where reviews of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998) left off —that is, debating whether the book is sophisticated entertainment or literature, whether Wolfe’s argument that realism is indispensable to the modern novel is true, and whether journalistic research ought to count for anything. Let me put this another way: in all of Wolfe’s novels, men are obsessed with their muscles. They silently name their muscle groups with benedictory monotony (tricep, deltoids, latissima dorsae, pectoralis major); they flex and fan out the latissimi dorsi in their backs when they want to make an impression. Muscles count. They count so much (literally—the text is peppered with pecs, abs, delts, traps, lats, tri’s, bi’s and obliques) that the reader is forced to make a decision. Is this obsession an indication of our age, or a reflection of Wolfe? Is our age one that is dominated by women with pineapple-coloured hair, one in which men often moan to themselves the words ‘loamy loins’? (Look to yourselves.) The problem with the reception of Wolfe’s novels is that reviewers have tended to get stuck on metatextual questions like these. If we keep the question of theme in mind when reading Wolfe, what becomes immediately obvious is that his fictional universe is an overwhelmingly humiliating one, so filled with mortification that one could even hypothesise a physics for it. And if we look at these laws of humiliation in detail, it becomes clear why Wolfe’s latest novel, I am Charlotte Simmons, is weaker than his other two, The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full.

Although I am Charlotte Simmons is about education, Wolfe’s attention isn’t on teachers or unions, but firmly focused on the bottom feeders of the modern university system—undergraduates. The novel, heavy with field research, is predictably drawn to education of the extracurricular kind. Why can’t white basketball players completely shave their heads? Who keeps on giving sports jocks SUV’s? And why are Diesel jeans so necessary? Following the trials of Charlotte Simmons through her first term at Dupont University (a fictional ivy-league college in North Carolina), the reader quickly realises that this isn’t life as an academic knows it but rather as an undergraduate struggles with it—and as Tom Wolfe researched it. The acknowledgements page of the novel thanks those (from multiple American universities) who took him clubbing; consequently, in I am Charlotte Simmons we get undergraduate nightlife as an octogenarian New Yorker sees it—a perspective clearly considered to be equivalent to Charlotte Simmons’s intellectually idealistic take on Dupont University. Charlotte is from a remote county and her family is poor and devout. Playing to two readerships, the narration blends her shock and his amusement—Wolfe’s generation gets an eyeful (this is what your children really do at college) and students feel the proud flush of being generational grist to a writer’s mill. As a journalist and a novelist, Wolfe has always demonstrated an almost anthropological fascination for idiomatic expressions, and here he gets to really let the beast off the leash. He has repeatedly argued that his reliance on ‘fieldwork’ research sets him alongside nineteenth- century realist novelists like Dickens, Zola, Balzac or Dostoyevsky.

Most reviewers don’t let Wolfe get away with this. Aside from the charge of sloppy writing, the one thing that critics love to hate in a Tom Wolfe novel is his tendency towards unkind caricature. Wolfe’s characters are cartoons of real human beings, critics argue, and as such, are very unlikely to provoke the reader’s sympathy. Reviewers can’t seem to help themselves—faced with a new Wolfe novel, there is something compulsive about posing the question of whether cheap characters make for cheap writing. As such, the critical debate each time he publishes a novel revolves around the question of whether he has a social conscience and, if not, whether he should get one. We expect him to flesh out the characters with a little kindness, nuance his writing by recoursing to morality.

But now that we have three novels, perhaps it is time to turn our attention to the thematic conditions that make such (supposed) unalloyed cheapness possible? The similarities in narrative structure between the three novels are striking. Each attempts to capture a milieu by assessing its impact on a particular individual. This impact is always in terms of a fall from grace—financial, social or moral. Bonfire of the Vanities is about New York, bond bankers and the fall of Sherman McCoy; A Man in Full is about Atlanta, property development and the fall of Charlie Croker. Not surprisingly, I am Charlotte Simmonsruns along the same lines—though this time, the fall is less impressively financial and more moral. All three novels depict how an individual comes to terms with institutions whose purpose seems only to dehumanise them (predominantly jails and universities). But most importantly, all three focus on one particular human activity to the exclusion of everything else—that is, the act of humiliating others. Wolfe’s fictional universe is an overwhelmingly humiliating one. There are creative and casual humiliations that stimulate (and possibly tire) the reader in their anthropologically voyeuristic tone. Wolfe’s nuance lies not in morality but in varying shades of humiliation. There is the humiliation of not knowing that every Hyatt hotel has an atrium; of being sexiled; of being given a 26 cent tip for delivering fifty dollars worth of pizzas and feeling too physically intimidated to ask for more; of running the gauntlet of Saturday night dormitory troglodytes; of being kicked off the starting team for the year’s first basketball game.

Power in Wolfe’s universe comes from prestige or status. Power is diminished by humiliation. All three novels document the machinations of a particular society by observing closely how the social order can crush an individual. Humiliation, then, is anthropological. Nearly all of the supporting characters will stand to gain prestige by the protagonist’s decline. Plot lines from ‘high’ and ‘low’ society will converge on each other in order to emphasise the rise and fall of this prestige. There are always multiple love-interests, and the protagonists are not so much concerned about this fact as with the possibility of this multiplicity being made public. In fact, publicity is the key indicator of humiliation in a Wolfe novel—you aren’t humiliated unless everyone knows it. What better way to demonstrate the frisson between public and private spheres than the airing of dirty laundry?

Humiliation and prestige are subject to an endless process of redistribution. Wolfe’s universe only seems entropic because his narrative is geared towards demonstrating one half of the process. Charlotte, Sherman, and Charlie all fail at doing that on which they pride themselves, but for each of them Wolfe hints at ways in which they can gain prestige by reassessing their priorities. Sherman McCoy loses his money, job and wife, faces a future in jail, but becomes proud of being a professional Defendant. Charlie Croker renounces his wealth and tours the country, preaching the wonders of Epictetus’ The Stoics. Charlotte becomes basketball star Jojo Johanssen’s girlfriend, pointed out and feted at basketball games, though dismissively greeted by her professors after flunking her midterm exams. The humiliations they suffer change them substantially—Wolfe’s caricaturist’s wit does at least allow for character development. It’s just in Sherman and Charlotte’s cases, we aren’t particularly sympathetic to what they’ve become.

Wolfe even waxes poetic on the matter of humiliation. A third of the way into the novel, Wolfe shifts gear (the previous chapter ended with two characters discoursing in ‘Fuck Patois’) and begins Chapter 12 (entitled ‘The H Word’) with this oration:

Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals—male humiliation? Oh, the bards, the balladeers have stirred us with epics of the humiliated male’s obsession with revenge… but that is letting the poor devil off easy. After all, the very urge, Vengeance is mine, gives him back a portion of his manhood, retaliation being manly stuff . But the feeling itself, male humiliation, is unspeakable. No man can bring himself to describe it... A word, an image, a smell, a face will bring it flashing back, and he will experience the very feeling, every neural sensation of that moment, and he will drown all over again in the shame of lying still for his own unsexing.

This passage is key to understanding why I am Charlotte Simmons is generally a weaker novel than Wolfe’s first two: the Proustian recollection of the humiliating moment is specifically gendered. The mortifications that Sherman and Charlie suffer are breathtaking in their psychological ingenuity, but with Charlotte, they are predictable. Sherman sets off the court metal detector with his fillings, Charlie’s jet is impounded in front of him—but Charlotte’s crowning humiliation is the familiar story of losing one’s virginity to someone who boasts about it. Furthermore, Charlotte’s forms of retaliation are very different from Sherman and Charlie’s. For the two men, it is a question of revenge, of male pride. In all three novels, male vengeance is considered analogous to baiting a dog so fiercely that the dog will overcome its training and bite back.

But Charlotte never bites back (there’s not even a metaphorical dog in her vicinity)—as one reviewer complained, she doesn’t have enough vinegar to her. She cringes and cringes. Her only alternative is to remind herself that it is just a matter of time before her brilliance is acknowledged by the Dupont world at large. The status she does gain by the end of I am Charlotte Simmons is through being an acquisition. More than a few reviewers have noted Wolfe’s lack of interest in women. It is not that this lack of interest that is, in itself, objectionable. But it does pose a problem when one’s protagonist is female. Charlotte can’t lovingly recite the terms tricep, deltoids, latissima dorsae, pectoralis major to herself (though I wish she did). All she can do is use the running machine and focus on how good her legs look: ‘…showing off her athletic legs was the main thing. She no longer thought of it as vanity. It was a necessity’. There is a type of girl that the boys at Dupont University call a ‘Monet’—that is, she looks great twenty-five feet away, but not so great closeup. The idea behind I am Charlotte Simmons was a great one—it’s just a shame that Wolfe’s characterisation of his protagonist doesn’t survive similar scrutiny.