And while “A Man in Full” sold over a million hardback copies (I was on to something as a kid), “Charlotte Simmons” underperformed, selling less than a third of that in its first few months. Michiko Kakutani called it “flat-footed,” Slate enumerated its “Three Hopeless Flaws” and the London Review of Books compared it to “a very bad Oliver Stone film.” Everyone noted the unseemliness of the septuagenarian writer’s research prowls through coed dorms and the rottenness of the sex scenes he returned with. But ultimately a writer is judged on writing, and “Charlotte Simmons” was universally found wanting. After Bush and the Iraq War, they weren’t so cute.
By 2004, his guardianship of that tradition was already endangered: Wolfe’s conservative politics had once served, like his famous white suits, to naughtily distinguish him from the run of right-thinking Northeastern writers. It’s been 15 years, now, since “Charlotte Simmons.” Despite its failures as a novel, the book is worth revisiting for what it represented in the career of Wolfe, who died last year, and in the tradition of American realism Wolfe reinvigorated with his novelistic “New Journalism” and journalistic novels.
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