Maybe Wolfe Should Have Tried Some Kmart Realism

Stephen King considers Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, wanting very much to like it if for no other reason than the "Intellectual Smarty Corps" that regularly dumps on popular fiction hated it. His final analysis is rather mixed:

"I wanted this to be one of those wild hog-stomping books; for a variety of reasons, not restricted to those mentioned above, it isn't. Even Wolfe's usually raucous language grows tiresome and eventually begins to grate--by page 600 or so, I felt a little as if I were listening to the longest Donna Summer disco tune ever recorded. Yet this immense (and immensely troubling) novel is driven by two things most American novels lack: ideas and ambition. Some of the ideas on view in Charlotte Simmons may provoke discussions deep into the night (the book seems to be a very hot item on many college campuses). Good--that's what social fiction's for. I only wish this novel's high ambition had not been so undone by its wooden characters, who move and speak but never really seem to breathe."

As one commenter on Mark Sarvas's blog (where I first saw this item) says, though, "anyone who's getting regularly published by the New Yorker has no business maintaining a chip on his shoulder about the Intellectual Smarty Corps." And I'm not entirely convinced that IACS is "serious popular fiction" just because Tom Wolfe happens to sell boatloads of books, but I suppose the difference between "serious popular fiction" and "literary fiction that sells" is something we could argue over for hours.

One should point out, though, that King's stacking the deck when he attacks the Literary Review for giving Wolfe their Bad Sex Award. "This is a book about college life!" King yelps. "Be honest: How many people do you know who had good sex in college?" But that, of course, isn't the point; as King surely knows, the award wasn't handed out for descriptions of bad sex, but for bad descriptions of sex.