Life is too short
Posted on | October 10, 2005 |
…for me to read another Tom Wolfe novel. I Am Charlotte Simmons made me feel like I was forcing myself to watch an old man masturbating over college students, all for the sake of some better cause. I’m not sure when rape became a plot device, but then I don’t read a lot of airport novels. This review should be enough to turn you off, but in an effort to save anyone else reading all 771 of them, I thought I’d share the one passage that I truly liked, where the nerdy Adam describes his theory of the Bad-Ass Rhodie to try to impress Charlotte:
“The Bad-Ass Rhodie… that’s an idea that just sort of developed after the end of the cold war, or right after the Gulf War, the first one, in 1991, I guess you could say. [...] Up ’til then, students like us used to just go to graduate school and become college teachers. But after that, a new type of intellectual comes on the scene: the bad-ass. The bad-ass is sort of a rogue intellectual. A bad-ass doesn’t want anything so boring and low-paid and like… codified… as teaching. The bad-ass types, they’re the types who don’t want to spend their twenties, they don’t want to spend the prime of life as a graduate student cooped up in some cubicle up in the stacks of the library. You’re an intellectual, but you want to operate on a higher level. This is a new millennium, and you want to be a member of the millennial aristocracy, which is a meritocracy, but an aristo-meritocracy. You’re a mutant. You’re an evolutionary advance. You’ve gone way beyond the ordinary ‘intellectual’ of the twentieth century. You’re not just some dealer in ideas who’s content to sell the ideas of a Marx or a Freud or a Darwin or a… a… a Chomsky… to the unenlightened.” He didn’t seem all that sure about Chomsky. “Those guys weren’t transmitters for other people’s ideas. Each one of them created a matrix, a mother of all ideas. That’s what a Millenial Mutant aims for. This is a new millennium, the twenty-first century is, and you’re going to create the new matrixes yourself, or matrices I guess it is, if you see what I’m saying?”
Yay for Adam. He doesn’t win the girl, but eventually scores the biggest victory of the book.
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October 11th, 2005 @ 8:51 pm
It’s probably memorable only for introducing Miranda Devine to the shocking phenomenon of “hooking up”. Oh no! College students have sex! Must be the fault of the po/mo relativists. If only they still taught the Canon, kids would kill their father Laius at a crossroads, then marry their mother Jocasta. Those were the good old days…