I am Still Tom Wolfe

In

1952 a promising young pitching prospect out of Washington and Lee University showed up for a tryout with the New York Giants (the baseball Giants, that is — they hadn't yet decamped for San Francisco). The prospect made a decent showing: three innings, three men on base, no runs scored. Good screwball, nice sinker, not much heat. "If somebody had offered me a Class D professional contract," says the prospect — whose name was Tom Wolfe — many decades later, "I would have gladly put off writing for a couple of decades."

But the Giants cut Wolfe after two days, and he became a giant of another kind. Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era. With books like The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities, he has built a towering reputation both as a journalist and as a novelist, scoring both literary acclaim and commercial success in the process. He has hung out with Black Panthers and astronauts. He has feuded with John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving simultaneously.

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Now, in his new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 676 pages), Wolfe has set himself the challenge of chronicling youthful hedonism on a college campus. But at 73, can Wolfe party with the frat boys? Or has America finally outrun its most tireless chronicler?

In uptown Manhattan, perched on a sofa in his sumptuous apartment, with its housekeeper and its blue baby grand and its views of Central Park, Wolfe in person is a sharp contrast to his personality on the page. His prose bristles with italics and exclamation points and repetitions — repetitions!--for emphasis, but Wolfe himself speaks softly, slowly and a little hoarsely, with the ruins of a long-ago Virginia accent. He has always been dapper, but now he is a dapper old man. His appearance is not so much wolfish as avian: his frame is slight, his nose hooked and beaky, his mischievous smile a little snaggle-toothed. His hair is midlength and floppy, à la David Spade. He still wears his trademark white suit, accessorized with some kind of high-gloss old-timey shoes, but it hangs a little loose on him. When he reads small print he dons a pair of white-framed glasses.

Wolfe's previous novel, A Man in Full, published in 1998, took him 11 long years to finish, and when he was finally through, he wasted no time looking around for fresh territory. He likes to portray himself as a literary opportunist: in his 1989 manifesto "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," he scolded American novelists for writing minimalist, self-conscious little books when there's so much rich, strange, documentary material out there. "They don't want to see the world," he has said, "they want to suck their thumbs." After A Man in Full, it occurred to Wolfe, who had a daughter at Duke, that the lives of college students were a trove of good stuff — there is, he points out, no really great novel about campus life from the student's point of view. "The whole business of the co-ed dorm fascinated me. What does go on? Because all these children assure their parents, 'It's just the way it was when you were in college.'"

It was thus that, in his eighth decade, Tom Wolfe swapped his white suit for a less conspicuous blue blazer and set out on a tour of college campuses in search of Charlotte Simmons. "I went to fraternity parties," he recalls. "Very few of the students had any idea who I was. I was so old, and I always wore a necktie — I must have seemed somewhat odd to them." He trekked from Stanford to Ann Arbor, from Chapel Hill to the University of Florida in Gainesville. "The most valuable things were having people tell you about things like sex. I didn't see any," he adds hastily. What he did see was a kind of boot camp where teenagers are initiated into the social matrices of sex and power against the autumnal backdrop of what Wolfe describes as "the gradual — maybe not so gradual — disappearance of conventional morality."