Old Man, Look at My Life

Michael Dirda begs to differ, somewhat, with the reviewers jumping on the Tom Wolfe dogpile. "For more than 40 years, the magnificently gifted Wolfe has shown us that he can draw with ease on every resource of English prose and then push hard against all the limits, whether of diction, point of view or conventional taste, and still make us marvel at the result," Dirda says, and he believes the new novel "shows us contemporary academia with all the passionate, naturalistic detail of a Zola depicting the workers and workings of a coal mine." But then the other shoe drops:

Throughout I Am Charlotte Simmons the writing is quite dazzling, as one expects from the author of The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities. There are brilliant, almost too obviously brilliant, set pieces (the chapter describing the Saint Ray fraternity "formal" in Washington, D.C., is a relentlessly graphic bacchanal cum dance of death). Every page displays a master of rhetoric, working every trope in the trivium. But is this an honest portrait of contemporary undergraduate life?

Here, Dirda joins the growing train of naysayers, adding that Wolfe's handling of his titular protagonist seems "patently unrealistic and sexist, not to add distinctly archaic." Which is about what you'd expect from "an unremitting scold, excoriating perceived depravity with all his genius for replicating the various argots of American life." Still, "I couldn't stop reading it -- who could? This is Tom Wolfe, after all." I'm willing to bet professional obligation had something to do with the relentless drive to the finish line, too. Meanwhile, the New Yorker cares only enough to briefly note IACS (as we'll be calling it now), calling it his "weakest" novel and concluding, "When Wolfe's reporting is dated, his fiction, for all its energy, seems stalled--an engine roaring in park."