The reason Mr. Wolfe's nonfiction works so well is that the writing is essentially a form of documentary film making–he provides the "status life" details of the characters–we see Twiggy modeling a plastic dress and swaying before the flashbulbs like a child who is lost in a strange city; Chuck Yeager limping after his collision on horseback with a cactus; the details are crisp and yet Mr. Wolfe is freed from the expectation that he's going to wrap up the story with a tidy plot.
Ah but in his novels Tom Wolfe hits you over the head with the tidy plot. In effect he spoils all his clarity by imagining that realism might well be a morality play and as Raskolnikov could tell you, things are so much more complicated than that.
I've been in mind of Tom Wolfe lately because while the snow flurries are still evident in Iowa City one can spy on any given night but especially on weekends large migrations of college girls wearing scanty cocktail dresses and spiked high heels–all of them bombed to the gills and staggering along the sidewalks and across the downtown pedestrian mall. And one is reminded of Wolfe's most recent novel I am Charlotte Simmons which offers a view of undergraduate life in which young women are expected to parade before the boys in the skimpiest of cocktail dresses.
The novel portrays a campus culture in which the morays of the 1950's (all that male dominance) are wedded (if you will) to the 1970's expectation of sexual promiscuity though unlike the 70's when women on campuses talked openly about equality and about Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex Wolfe describes a "meat market" version of undergrad culture where there's no hint of student feminism anywhere in student life save when the students, groggy and hungover chance to attend a class taught by some fossilized leftist professor who Wolfe is at pains to demonstrate has zero social consciousness outside of books.
While Mr. Wolfe splenetically presents "the campus" as a Roman sewer we see young Charlotte Simmons, a working class girl on scholarship who is caught up in a social status madcap rock wall climb for legitimacy by means of "being chosen" to accompany a popular fraternity boy to what the frat boys like to call "a mixer" which in the contemporary world means binge drinking at a hotel and then date raping the girl in the cocktail dress.
Which is of course exactly how it goes in Wolfe's novel. So as the college girls totter in the late spring cold and lean against downtown store fronts for support, wearing nothing but red or black cocktail dresses I am naturally in mind of the maestro's latest novel.
I don't think Wolfe has it entirely right. He's spot on about the contempt for women that's felt by scores of today's undergraduate boys and he's correct that this contempt renders women as nothing more than trifling sex objects. He's also correct when he describes the fraternity boys as being overtly and unironically declarative about the role of porn in their daily lives. IN effect, for the boys, girls in cocktail dresses are just "cum dumpsters" and of no more consequence than a mouse click.
What's missing from the novel is how we got here. How did undergraduate women go from an emergent sense of their bodies as a measure of social and political reality and yes, of possibility, to a more terrible abjection than even the 50's had to offer?
In Crime and Punishment we are allowed to see that Raskolnikov becomes a socio-path in part because he lives solely in a world of ideas–that is, he lives without people. Dostoevsky shows us what modernity is going to do to people. In effect if your neighbors aren't real but have become ideas only, why then you can do what you like with them. Kill your landlady.
But how did today's college boys get here? And the girls too?
Porn of course renders all human beings as abstractions. The internet furthers this by making suggestive online conversation possible even while both partners imagine the other is only a phantasm.
But the acculturation of porno-abstraction, masculine rage, binge drinking, and severely reduced feminist expectations are all symptoms and not the cause of the Charlotte Simmons epidemic.
My own guess is that middle class Americans hated feminist activism as much as they hated the Viet Nam era anti-war movement. Nixon's "silent majority" was Reagan's "its morning in America" crowd and they now have other names perhaps or are too diffuse to be easily characterized but their disdain for the E.R.A. or for a woman's right to choose is well documented and surely the GOP's fascination with Sarah Palin has more than a little connection with middle class disdain for NOW.
These are the children of the Reagan and Bush 80's and if you cast memory backward you'll remember the first bloom of the GOP's flip characterization of feminists as "femi-nazis" –as if those who sought to teach gender equality were thought police.
By the early 90's one could discern on college campuses a deep resistance to feminism as if a course or symposium that promised an analysis of gender inequality or an event that asked students to think about date rape was all some kind of conspiracy. Kids after all just want to have fun.
But that resistance to feminism is now a quaint idea as I see it. Reagan's children are out in force and they are very drunk and very confused.
IN turn the girl in the coctail dress is nothing more than Raskolnikov's landlady.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 