BOOK: "Who is Charlotte Simmons?"

I propose a selection for a parent-child Book Club, popular in elementary schools, providing intergenerational bonding over literature. Except this one would be at the college level.

I’m talking about Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, in which the protagonist goes off on a scholarship to an elite university—the fictional “Dupont,” where she expects to find peers who are not only intellectually but also morally superior to the yahoos back home. Instead she finds rampant sex, drugs and alcohol, racial and social intolerance, eating disorders, blatant consumerism, selfish ambition coupled with academic laziness (including cheating)—you name it, “Dupont” embodies it.

Before leaving her there, Charlotte’s mother tells her if she doesn’t want to “git pushed into thangs … All you got to say is, ‘I’m Charlotte Simmons, and I don’t hold with thangs like ’at.’” But the book’s title is supremely ironic, for Charlotte has no idea who she is. Overcoming her initial horror, she quickly becomes sucked in by the scene: spends a large percent of her money on designer clothes; pursues a relationship with a BMOC despite realizing he’s a soulless predator; rejects a true potential soul-mate because he’s too geeky; completely neglects her former lifeline of academics; and arrives home for Christmas catatonically depressed.

Everyone in the novel proves similarly shallow (possible exception: the dumb jock, who struggles for depth but is too dumb). And every character—albeit brilliantly, accurately captured—is just as flat and stereotyped: frat boy, preppie date, bulimic roommate, basketball team homeboy, militant activist, self-centered nerd, oily college president, self-righteous professor, manipulative coach … It’s highly entertaining. But I couldn’t help wondering why I was slogging through all 676 pages when I couldn’t sympathize with any of the characters.

This, however, is not the question most people of my generation (40s and up) ask when they read this book. Rather, it’s “Is college really like this nowadays?” For the few I found who confronted their college-age children (“I hope this isn’t what your college experience is actually like…”), the children, not having read the book, were able to brush them off (“Yeah, Dad, you don’t want to know!”) or plead ignorance. (“Mom, what are you talking about? Who is this Charlotte Simmons?”)

Okay, I can see how anyone who attended college before the sexual revolution might be shocked by all the casual “hooking up.” And a few of the most de-humanizing phenomena Wolfe describes didn’t exist a generation ago (cell phones, co-ed bathrooms). If you were fortunate enough to attend an institution with enough real estate to give every student his or her own room, you wouldn’t have gotten “sexiled.” Still, much of the book rang true for me: drunken hazes; party suites; the club that kept a file of old papers for members to re-submit; sexual experimentation; consciousness-raising about date rape, the girl we watched pile food onto her tray, then excuse herself to vomit— Need I go on? Maybe it never happened to you. Or maybe you need a reminder.

When I described the book to current students and recent grads, it invariably struck a chord. “Sounds just like college!” quipped a senior who took my phonecall at the Brown Office of Public Relations (where I was referred after tryng the Offices of Student Life and Residential Life). She confirmed that “sexiling” was common, adding, “Freshman year is an excess. We used to be such party animals.” Invited to comment, Margaret Klawunn, Brown’s Interim Dean for Campus Life, did not respond. Students who readily corroborated Wolfe’s depiction of college life gave me permission to quote them—as long as I didn’t use their names. I was told, “Wesleyan is quite the place for drugs,” and, “Freshman year, I was surrounded by guys who were big alcoholics”—this from a 2004 graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, where the Thomas Wolfe now listed in the student directory is allegedly the writer’s son. “I’ve never seen so many kids destroy private property in my life. They would tear down signs in the dining hall, kick over trash cans full of trash in their own dorms, pee and puke all over the place…”

“A cesspool of drugs and sex—that may be a gross understatement,” was the reaction of Cherisse Cobrand, a black scholarship student at Duke who alone was willing to be identified. Another Duke junior who sees many parallels between Duke and “Dupont” claims that Wolfe’s daughter attended Duke. After describing “insane partying and illicit fraternizing,” this student reported, “Perhaps more disconcerting to me, however, is the prevalence of political apathy.… There are many curious, aware, interested-in-the-world students at Duke, but it is masked under a pretense of unconcern.… Paradoxically, I've been able to capitalize on this.” She attributed her appointments as Teaching and Research Assistants to the fact that “there aren’t many people competing with me for the positions, the talking time in class, the special opportunities, the awards and distinctions.” Charlotte Simmons becomes demoralized by this observation instead of using it as a chance to shine.

The Yale alumni magazine printed a panel discussion among students entitled “Are You Charlotte Simmons?” Upshot: yes, all this goes on, but you don’t have to let it dominate your experience. I heard similar testimony from students at Middlebury, Tufts, and Harvard: “It’s part of the culture, but you can avoid it if you want to.” Those who were most blasé about the lack of personal control had already encountered it—often in a more extreme form— in high school.

Some colleges are successfully curtailing the worst kinds of destructive behavior. I received extensive evidence of crackdowns at Duke—largely in response to lawsuits and negative publicity. Colleges have also established networks of support services, such as ”Behavioral Health Centers” and the aforementioned Dean of Campus Life. On many campuses students can choose to live among others who share their values—same-sex housing, over-21 housing, Christian housing. The existence of these options can reassure students and parents. But those who feel most depressed and isolated are often least likely to seek support. When Charlotte drums up the courage to approach her R.A. (“Residential Advisor”), the insincere platitudes she hears only make her feel worse later. At Duke, I was told, responsibility for rules enforcement often falls to R.A.’s, who “tend to turn a blind eye.” “My R.A. was a sophomore guy—was I going to go to him?” said the grossed-out Trinity graduate.

So where does that leave you, the concerned parent?

One of my most interesting interviews was with a Harvard scholarship student who claims he’s never encountered most of what Charlotte did—except estrangement from family. “Every person I know who went home for Thanksgiving had some sort of breakdown and wanted to leave [home] immediately,” he said, admitting there’s a “distance” whenever he tries to talk to his parents—even the one with a college degree. “It kinds of feels empty when I’m trying to explain to them everything I went through. The more involved I get and the more I do, the harder it is to communicate with them.” Not understanding what a “tutorial” is, his parents can’t appreciate how much harder he has to work in one. Every time he mentions The Crimson (which he writes for), “I have to remind them it’s the newspaper.” They don’t see why he has to get off the phone at 11 p.m. to attend a Crimson meeting. Summers aren’t so bad, he says; eventually he re-adjusts to the culture of home. But for short vacations, “I’d almost prefer not to have a break.” Talking to him reminded me of the chapter in which Charlotte writes a glib letter home—annotated after almost every sentence with her private reflections on reality.

Who’s responsibile for this lack of connection? And is it inevitable, or should we resist? “Sometimes I think the parents don’t want to have an idea of what it’s like!” the Brown senior said when I mentioned my facetious Book Group plan. Repeatedly, collegians expressed this sentiment: “My mother trusts me… She doesn’t really want to know what goes on.” Becoming an adult is partly about gaining independence. Children need freedom and privacy—even if this means they’ll make mistakes. My neighbor whose daughter graduated a few years ago from Tom Wolfe’s alma mater, Washington & Lee (which Wolfe denies is the novel’s basis), told me, “You raise your child and have confidence in them… I firmly believe there are things you’re better off not knowing.” Having read the novel, along with other Wolfe books, this father conceded, “He always gets the language and the atmosphere right. The question is how much he’s exaggerating—I hope a lot.” Of his own daughter, he remembers thinking, “‘She has more sense than this; she’d never do this. She’s not so shallow, vain, and stupid.’”

I believe in trust. But I also believe in discussion. My husband arrived home from his commute one night shaken by an NPR report about binge drinking on college campuses. “If I’d only warned her before she went,” lamented a mother whose freshman daughter died of alcohol poisoning. (Guess what we talked about with our children at the dinner table that night?) One young woman told me her lowest point in college was salvaged by a conversation with her father, who’d attended the same college thirty years before. Duke junior Cherisse Cobrand credited her mother for giving her a strong sense of identity when she wrote me, “Those people who did not know who they were or what they stood for prior to college literally lose their minds once they are there.… I thank my mother all the time for never sheltering me from the world, as I find that those students who never got the chance to be strong individuals growing up become subject to all sorts of influences in college.”

Does your child know who s/he is? Enough to withstand exposure to thousands of very different identities?

If you don’t want a truthful—admittedly satirical—depiction of the current American college scene, don’t read I Am Charlotte Simmons. On the other hand, if you do read it—and can get your kid to—you may be able, when dropping said kid off at college this August, to say something more helpful than Charlotte’s mother’s “… no matter whirr you’re at in the whole wide world, you’ll always be our good, good girl.”

And come the first vacation, you might be better equipped than Mrs. Simmons to deal with that strange person upstairs who can’t get out of bed or speak in anything other than monosyllables.

[Gigi Edwards spent 17 years as a high school teacher and college counselor.]

[This article appears in the July 2005 issue of East Side Monthly.]