Moo
Jane Smiley, 1995
Knopf Doubleday
437 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307472762
Summary
A big, blackly comic, wickedly-on-target send up of our society—all of it—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres. As a microcosm of today's western world, Smiley gives readers a huge Midwestern agricultural college nicknamed Moo U.
Nestled in the heart of the Midwest, amid cow pastures and waving fields of grain, lies Moo University, a distinguished institution devoted to the art and science of agriculture.
Here, among an atmosphere rife with devious plots, mischievous intrigue, lusty liaisons, and academic one-upmanship, Chairman X of the Horticulture Department harbors a secret fantasy to kill the dean; Mrs. Walker, the provost's right hand and campus information queen, knows where all the bodies are buried; Timothy Nonahan, associate professor of English, advocates eavesdropping for his creative writing assignments; and Bob Carlson, a sophomore, feeds and maintains his only friend: a hog named Earl Butz.
In this wonderfully written and masterfully plotted novel, Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres, offers us a wickedly funny comedy that is also a darkly poignant slice of life. (From the publisher.)