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.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 26, 1949
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Rasied—Webster Grove, Missouri
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.A., M.F.A, and Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1992; National Book Critics Circle Award, 1991
• Currently—lives in Northern California
Jane Smiley is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love & Good Will, A Thousand Acres (for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize), and Moo. She lives in northern California. (From the publisher.)
More
Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a B.A. at Vassar College, then earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar.
Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.
From 1981 to 1996, she taught undergrad and graduate creative writing workshops at Iowa State University. She continued teaching at ISU even after moving her primary residence to California.
In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Delectably entertaining.... An uproariously funny and at the same time hauntingly melancholy portrait of a college community in the Midwest.
The New York Times
Smart, irreverent, and wickedly tender.... Moo suggests a mix of Tom Wolfe's wit and John Updike's satiny reach.
The Boston Globe
Displays a wicked wit and an unerring eye for American foibles.... Stuffed with memorable characters, sparkling with deliciously acid humor, Moo is a rare bird in today'sliterary menagerie: a great read that also makes you think.
The Chicago Sun-Times
In Smiley's world, people are sometimes greedy, foolish, and muddleheaded, but they are most often triumphant.
BookList
Effortlessly switching gears after the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, Smiley delivers a surprising tour de force, a satire of university life that leaves no aspect of contemporary academia unscathed. The setting is a large midwestern agricultural college known as Moo U., whose faculty and students Smiley depicts with sophisticated humor, turning a gimlet eye on the hypocrisy, egomania, prejudice and self-delusion that flourish on campus—and also reflect society at large. Everybody at Moo U. has an agenda: academic, sexual, social, economic, political and philosophical. Among the more egregious types that Smiley portrays are Dr. Lionel Gift, an intellectual whore who calls students "customers" and is willing to skew research to further his name and line his pocketbook; Dr. Bo Jones, who is conducting a secret experiment on an appealing boar named Earl Butz (Earl and the horses on campus are nicer than the humans by a mile); and a superlatively bossy secretary who is a lot smarter than the Ph.Ds she serves. A chapter titled "Who's in Bed With Whom" clears things up in that department—but only temporarily, since musical beds is a continuous game. A quartet of women roommates who all hide secrets from each other, an unscrupulous "little Texan with jug ears" who wants to give the college tainted money, and a stuffy dean who thinks that anything he desires is God's will are some of the large cast of characters that Smiley manipulates with remarkable ease—and though some portrayals verge on caricature, she never goes over the line. Details of midwest topography, weather and culture are rendered with unerring authenticity. The narrative sails along with unflagging vigor and cleverness, and even the ironic denouement has an inevitability that Smiley orchestrates with hilarious wit.
Publishers Weekly
Smiley, now acclaimed for her portrayals of the dark side of America's pastoral ideal (a Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, plus her wonderful novellas, Ordinary Love and Good Will), returns with a sharp-edged spoof of academic life. "Moo U" is a large, Midwestern "ag and tech" school where campus politics and intrigue rule. Smiley has assembled a large, colorful group of characters who will be familiar to ivory tower dwellers: the campus secretary who controls personnel and paper flow, the faculty who plot for power and revenge, plus the dining hall worker, the students, and the administrators, all with their own agendas. While entertaining and on-target as parody, Moo is not as riveting as Smiley's best work. This should do well and be very popular with higher education insiders. —Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Library Journal<
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
top of page