Big babe on campus.(I am Charlotte Simmons)(book)(Book Review)

I am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe; Vintage, 2004, $49.95.

THE YOUNG frat-brats at Tom Wolfe's mythical ivy-league Dupont University use the freshettes--the "fresh meat" as they scornfully term them--in order to boast about their conquests afterwards to establish their credentials. Drunk with ale and snobbish prestige, the frat-brats hold competitions to see who can manoeuvre the clueless freshettes naked into bed within seven minutes. This determines their personal degree of glamour in their frat societies. That, and being "cool".

But perhaps the freshettes weren't all that clueless after all. They were handing over their bodies in order to achieve their own prestige in the girls' hierarchy, second league though it might be. They were proving that they were considered more desirable than the "also-ran" girls, because they were seen in the company of the top prestige frat-brats or the muscle-bound basketball stars. They were proud of being humped by the very top gorillas. The sex may or may not have been incandescent, or even halfway pleasant. That was irrelevant. Enjoying the social prestige of being seen in the right company and receiving the right invitations, that was exquisite.

In I am Charlotte Simmons Tom Wolfe has the courage to write about sex from the girl's point of view. His melodramatic heroine, a chaste Carolina mountain girl, can choose her beau from the intellectually aspirational but weedy and nerdy Adam; or the muscularly bulging basketball star "Go Go Jojo", who pretends to be dumber than he really is so he will be accepted by his fellow stars; or the super-cool frat-brat Hoyt, who ruthlessly plans her seduction and public humiliation.

Adam can talk and write, but he can't kiss. Jojo can bound like a panther all over the court, but he can't talk, apart, that is, from illiterate ghetto "fuck patois". Hoyt is super-cool, at least by the standards agreed on by his fellow teenagers. His opening line, with all his maidenly victims, is always the same: "Has anyone ever told you that you look like Britney Spears?" His talk is limited but lethal. Though he may seem socially desirable, and it is good to be seen with him in public, he is a cad, a villain to be hissed and booed in the manner of a Victorian melodrama.

Wolfe's chosen genre is a grotesque reversal of a Gothic romance with a dithyrambic focus on erotic anatomy. Clearly he has worked hard to win his coveted award for bad writing on teenage sex. He deserves it and good luck to him. His novel is an amusing mesalliance of sentimental Mills and Boon with the anatomical close-ups of soft porn. We are offered the bumps and grinds of the mons veneris with full-on mountain beavers. The old saga of the Victorian fallen woman combined with contemporary pornography. Crass? Yes. Obsessive? Yes. Primitive page-turner appealing to our prurient, lascivious yearnings? Triple yes.

But maybe Wolfe is right. Teenage sex is full of Gothic despair unto death and breathless, melodramatic romance. The thing about Wolfe is that he is a puny little aesthete in a dapper white suit and a dandy white bow-tie with white panama hat. Like many puny aesthetes, Wolfe cannot help adoring the muscles of gorilla-like basketball, lacrosse and football players, and loathing the ugly physiques of flat-chested intellectuals, middle-aged flabbies and decrepit, elderly wrecks.