Big Tom in Campus

...Charlotte the innocent enters a world of cocky jocks, bookish dweebs, and hard-drinking frat boys, DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71 BOOKS IN REVIEW and through the eyes of this sweet, innocent but perceptive young woman, Wolfe weaves a story not of struggling feminism but rather of nascent manliness attempting to blossom in the overweening atmosphere of what he calls the "age of the wuss...

...Plowing through Ms...

...At his peak, Tom Wolfe ascended to greatness, based more on his magical feats with words than the cleverness of his plotting...

...Hunter S. Thompson...

...The energy...

...Perhaps that is why his fame as a "new journalist" transcends that of a "new novelist...

...Or at least one hopes...

...Who has me pegged for style...

...The imagery...

...He described the style in his 1965 breakout book, The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, as follows: It was a garage sale, that piece...

...Brock Yates is the author most recently of NASCAR Off the Record and Against Death and Time...

...Slowly the realization descends on one, "Hey...

...His blow-out bestseller on racial tension, government blundering, and high society sophistry in his 1970 masterpiece, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, must stand as one of the greatest pieces of social commentary produced during the entire 20th century...

...This is a novel...

...I've seen these people before...

...The message, such as it is, evolves like an overlong master's thesis...

...Tom Wolfe has long been fascinated with the state of the male animal in modern society, as artfully rendered in both The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full...

...Surely a vast percentage of readers will be college graduates, or, at the very least, have been exposed to life within academia, including an awareness of all the stereotypes playing central roles--i.e., the simple but bright hick from nowhere, the hot-shot letterman, the smart-ass BMOC, and the bookish Dean's List dweeb...

...My ham-fisted take-out had appeared in the pages of Car and Driver, an outrider publication operating vaguely in the style that Wolfe had pioneered as "The New Journalism"—an outrageous literary form that would spawn such fine writers in his wake as Gay Talese, Joe McGinnis, Joe Eszterhas, and the Gonzo Lord, Dr...

...This time Ms...

...But in his novels, where he has also been obligated to create the plot, his earlier, electrically charged verbiage often lazily spreads over page after page before reaching flatlined conclusions...

...When he first burst onto the scene in the pages of the old New York Herald Tribune and Esquire in themid-'60s, Tom Wolfe not only tipped over the starchy conventions of accepted writing style, but hooted down the fusty incantations of the literary hierarchy, much as Ernest Hemingway had done with his shocking, bare-boned, adjective-shorn efforts of the late '20s...

...His most recent efforts have centered on best-sellingbut rather paunchy novels, including his first effort, the wildly celebrated Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), followed by A Man in Full (1998) and the subject of this protracted ramble, I Am Charlotte Simmons...

...Those wild men, with their antic prose, not only generated great admiration and feeble imitations from punks like myself, but grumpy outrage from such literary lions as John Updike and Norman Mailer...

...Simmons serves as a refractory of male strengths and weaknesses during three flings with prototypical university types—a super jock, a Big-Man-On-Campus fraternity honcho, and a bookish intellectual...

...What interested me was not simply the discovery that it was possible to write accurate non-fiction with techniques usually associated with novels and short stories, it was that—plus...

...It was Wolfe himself who best described his revolutionary "new journalism" in a 1973 anthology by leading writers of the movement...

...Simmons' life, concurrent with raging, rutting sex by everybody but the dorm proctors, plus standard-issue frat boy pranks and boozing bouts...

...If there has been one elemental criticism, Wolfe's glittering character profiles in his novels generally 72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 1=11111111111111^11111111 EINI1111111101111111111111 SARKES TARZIAN INC Sarkes Tarzian Television Sarkes Tarzian Radio Broadcasters Making a Difference...

...The sheer incendiary power of the language...

...It is, in essence, the entangled tale of a simple but gifted young woman—the aforementioned Ms...

...to borrow Wolfe's trademark exclamation point): 676 pages of furbelow-packed Wolfean entertainment and enlightenment...

...Simmons' plunge into Dupont's environs—both light and dark—kept reminding me not of Wolfe's novelistic efforts but rather of his early brilliance in such knife-edged nonfiction sniping as his take-down of the drug-fogged hippie scene in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or his stunningly brilliant look at the early space age in The Right Stuff...

...Yes...

...But as the leader of the rebels—in terms of his pyrotechnic style and surgical dissections of the famous and the fatuous—it was Wolfe who would rise to literary immortality as perhaps the greatest writer of contemporary English prose in the late 20th century...

...During his debut, he recorded real people in real situations—generally offbeat and contradictory—with some of the wittiest, most provocative, and spellbinding language ever laid on paper...

...Ironically, the photo shows the young master of prose in an ordinary suit, before his elegant white linen outfit became his trademark...

...Pegged for style...

...For example, one witnesses Charlotte and her Daddy and Momma moving into room 516 on the fifth floor of her Dupont dormitory for no less than six pages—a seemingly endless descriptive interlude about settling a freshman into new surroundings that deserves, with classic Wolfean energy, more like six sentences...

...Simmons—who leaves her North Carolina hill country hovel to enroll on scholarship in the Ivy-laced environs of Dupont University—an amalgam of Duke, Harvard, and Stanford that ranks among the world's best institutions of higher learning, not only among the academia but in the world of rammin-and-jammin big time college basketball...

...The exact date is long forgotten, but surely centers on the mid-'60s, following my blundering parody of Wolfe's spectacular 1964 Esquire short story on Southern stock car star Junior Johnson titled, "The Last American Hero...

...This revelation arrives through osmosis as Wolfe cleverly inserts his characters into Ms...

...That was its virtue...

...to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally...

...vignettes, odds and ends of scholarship, bits of memoir, short bursts of sociology, apostrophes, epithets, moans, cackles, anything that came into my head, much of it thrown together in a rough and awkward way...

...You want a novel...

...Best Wishes from Tom Wolfe...

...It was the discovery that it was possible in nonfiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness, and to use many different kinds simultaneously, or within a relatively short space...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW Big Tom on Campus I Am Charlotte Simmons Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 676 pages, $28.95) Reviewed by Brock Yates P.- ANGING ON THE WALL Of my billiard room—amidst a mass of nominal trophies and assorted effluvia collected during a wasted lifetime scribbling about automobiles and related nonsense—is an autographed picture which reads, "For Brock Yates...

...IT IS HERE THAT THE READER MAY STUMBLE while pushing through Wolfe's often brilliant verbal thicket...

...Example: Bonfire was energized by a series of brilliant vignettes rather than a truly cohesive storyline but then merely dribbled away, as if Wolfe, in Hunter Thompson-style, had shot his typewriter...

...It showed me the possibility of there being something "new" in journalism...