I recently finished Tom Wolfe’s latest book, I Am Charlotte Simmons. The first time I encountered Wolfe, in the form of The Right Stuff, I was inspired to dash out and take flying lessons. (I never did earn my pilot’s license, so I guess I had the wrong stuff, but I soloed twice. Does that count?) Then I tried The Bonfire of the Vanities, but it didn’t cause me to aspire to Master of the Universe status. I recall hating every character in the book, and feeling furthermore like the narrator was contemptuous of both them and his readers, but being entertained nonetheless. I’m sorry to report that Charlotte Simmons engendered the exact same feelings in me.

To give Wolfe his due, though, I did read compulsively until the end. He is funny and sharp, and strangely enough his descriptions of modern-day university life brought back my own college days, these 20 years past. At the same time I was very conscious that the narrator was this old guy trying to sound hip. (Note to Wolfe: Reduce usage of the term “iliac crest” to once per sex scene, at maximum. “Mons pubis” is also not a term that probably runs through a teenager’s head while making out, even if she is Ivy League.)

If anyone out there read it, can you please explain the ending to me? (Warning: minor spoilers ahead.) Most of the characters’ plots were fully resolved by the end, with the “good” characters winning and the “bad” characters getting their comeuppance. When Charlotte lets her studies lapse and becomes the girlfriend of the airhead jock, are we supposed to think she won, or lost? Or is her determination to “have that conversation with herself” supposed to hold out some hope for her without tying it all up too neatly? I mean, yes, I understand that as a reader I am supposed to eschew the Fallacy of Authorial Intent and Make Up My Own Damn Mind, but when Wolfe sets up all these deus ex machina rewards and punishments for the other characters, I’m not exactly expecting subtlety elsewhere. My book ended with the last page of text (no blank page or acknowledgments or author’s bio), and I thought I may have been missing a few pages.

After I’d finished Charlotte Simmons I felt like my sensibilities could use a good scrubbing. So I turned to Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl, a book I read as a child and had the urge to read again. Alcott was my first encounter with the 19th century in novels, a century I would return to over and over again for my reading pleasure and, as Husband will tell you, a time in which I’ve practically taken up permanent residence as an adult. Even as a child I thought Alcott was awfully preachy, and I find her characters outside of Little Women too much alike, but as a child I found her pictures of domestic life incredibly charming. I wanted that vigorous home life, with creative games and outdoorsy pursuits.

An Old-Fashioned Girl seemed kind of flat to me on this reading. Even adjusting for the fact that I’ve outgrown children’s tales, the detail didn’t seem as rich as I remembered. I just realized that all these years I’ve been carrying around a vague impression of the plot of the book, along with one specific line that stuck in my head, where the heroine muses on the fashion of spelling girls’ names with an “ie” at the end instead of a “y” (Fannie, Trixie). It struck me originally because then, of course, the trend was to spell them with an “i” (Candi, Misti), and “ie” seemed quaint and, well, old-fashioned to my twelve-year-old mind. I’ve just finished the whole book, and I didn’t run across that line anywhere. The book says “complete and unabridged,” but could it have been based on a version that was abridged for children, and hence the perceived lack of detail?

Two textual mysteries. Can anyone help?