He was, of course, much further from his own youth by 2004, but despite the cringe factor, that didn’t disqualify him. Long before the real estate magnates of “A Man in Full” or the bond traders of “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Wolfe made his name documenting postwar youth culture. And it wasn’t as though Wolfe hadn’t covered the Youth before.
As the recent admissions scandals remind us, nowhere are those mechanics more on display than at American colleges and universities, engines of social mobility and class reinforcement both. It should have been good! Wolfe’s great theme was status in America, the mechanics of social distinction in an ostensibly classless country. And while “A Man in Full” sold over a million hardback copies (I was on to something as a kid), “Charlotte Simmons” underperformed, selling less than a third of that in its first few months. Michiko Kakutani called it “flat-footed,” Slate enumerated its “Three Hopeless Flaws” and the London Review of Books compared it to “a very bad Oliver Stone film.” Everyone noted the unseemliness of the septuagenarian writer’s research prowls through coed dorms and the rottenness of the sex scenes he returned with. But ultimately a writer is judged on writing, and “Charlotte Simmons” was universally found wanting. After Bush and the Iraq War, they weren’t so cute. By 2004, his guardianship of that tradition was already endangered: Wolfe’s conservative politics had once served, like his famous white suits, to naughtily distinguish him from the run of right-thinking Northeastern writers.
It’s been 15 years, now, since “Charlotte Simmons.” Despite its failures as a novel, the book is worth revisiting for what it represented in the career of Wolfe, who died last year, and in the tradition of American realism Wolfe reinvigorated with his novelistic “New Journalism” and journalistic novels.
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