Do you have a novel you keep trying to finish but never manage to? A novel that is not so much a book as a battle you neither win, nor stop fighting? I do. It's I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe's story of hedonistic goings-on at a fictional American university.
My relationship with the book continues thus: I stride into my living room and pick it off the bookshelf. I sit down and start reading, determined that this time I will not just finish it but really enjoy it. I give up around page 80. I sigh and return the book to the shelf. I repeat the process three or four months later.
It's strange, because Wolfe and I normally get along just fine. With The Bonfire Of The Vanities and A Man In Full, the white-suited one cleverly and hilariously captured the hour. Bonfire's Sherman McCoy and A Man's Charles Crocker are wonderful characters; the reader is both delighted and appalled by their spectacular downfalls. Crocker, in particular, is marvellous: look no further than the Breeding Barn chapter for some passages that are utterly sickening yet completely irresistible. I've read both books cover-to-cover several times and don't feel I'm done yet with A Man ...
Neither book is slim, but Wolfe has that Dickensian knack of making a lengthy work seem a mere novella once in your hands. However, Charlotte Simmons reads as even more sprawling and bloated than its 688 pages suggest. In trying to satirise university life, Wolfe loses his way and writes like an embarrassing uncle, trying to "get down with the kids" at his niece's 18th birthday. As for Simmons herself, a girl feeling isolated and appalled at university should be an open goal in the hands of any novelist, let alone one as skilled as Wolfe. But I just find myself wanting to tell her to go home if she hates it that much.
However, the real curiosity is not why I enjoyed some Wolfe novels but not others. It is after all a rare author who can hit the mark every time. No, more intriguing is why when it comes to Charlotte Simmons, I keep going back for more, throwing good time after bad. The excuses I come up with get sillier and sillier: "You just need to give it more of a chance" (how many chances can a novel be granted?); "Stop being so harsh, you've never been to an American university" (neither have I ever been a Wall Street trader but I was allowed to be critical of Bonfire); "perhaps you just need to travel to a retreat where there is nothing to do but read it" (Oh leave it! He's not worth it ...)
Once, while rather merry and optimistic after a long lunch in central London, I even bought a second copy of it to get cracking with on my train journey home. I fell asleep on the train and now have two copies of a book I can't finish. Have you ever read I Am Charlotte Simmons right through? Can you give me a good reason to have another go?
I understand that later in the novel there are some wonderfully cringeworthy sex scenes. I wouldn't know: not even that prospect has ever managed to entice me to keep going. But I know I'll keep trying to finish it - I'm probably due my next crack at it in March 2008.
