February 06, 2005

Recommended by the President

President Bush has great tastes in books. Officially he's reading His Excellency and Alexander Hamilton. Elisabeth Bumiller reports that he's also read I Am Charlotte Simmons. According to Bumiller, the President is a Tom Wolfe fan.

Critics may claim the President is a moral values hypocrite for recommending a novel filled with lurid sex, raunchy language, and binge drinking. Critics playing pop psychologists may also try to see this as Bush projecting his wild past. If they just focus on the debauchery there's missing some important points to the novel. One of them being how an individual finds belonging in a new, strange environment.

"Why is Bush Reading Tom Wolfe? Don't Ask" [via Drudge]

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For more on Wolfe's much-talked about novel there's Deacon's report from a facinating D.C. discussion I watched on CSPAN.

In his review of the book Peter Berkowitz also sees Charlotte's need for belonging:

Instead, as March Madness approaches and Dupont’s basketball team peaks for the ncaa championships, she overcomes the disabling depression into which she had fallen and recovers her health. But she is no longer quite the same person, having learned in Wolfe’s wonderfully ambiguous final pages to quiet her conscience and tame her pride, to use her brains and her body to get along and get ahead, and to find a boyfriend she likes, who brings her high status, and enables her to join in with the crowd, but whom she never could love. In short, despite her upbringing and gifts, Charlotte proves herself to be an excellent student of the university’s unofficial but central teaching: the old restraints are antiquated and high ideals only interfere with the attainment of the authentic goods civilized life has to offer.

In a review for Crisis F. H. Buckley sees the characters in quite a dark image:

The athlete who gazes lovingly at himself in the mirror, the frat man who starts a food program to win the attention of Dupont’s admissions officer, the liberal wuss who schemes to become an “aristo-meritocrat,” the chorus of wallflowers who miss out on the rutrutrutting all about them and whose morality is a Nietzscheian ressentiment of sexual privilege, even Charlotte herself in her pathetic desire for recognition—all are the very picture of narcissism. They inhabit a Homeric world in which personal worth, even the sense of self-worth, is defined solely by their image in the mirror of the eyes of others, and in which the interior self is nearly lost. At times Wolfe’s affectless characters glimpse two of themselves, one interior and the other looking in, but it is always the exterior person who is dominant.

Ken Masugi wishes Wolfe would "take the mean between Socrates and Stoicism and discover Aristotle. And may that be his opening to the Bible and an even greater flourishing of his mind."