Moo

Rating:
Summary: Much needed skewering of heartland academia
Review: A couple of years ago Jill and I played a game in which we would take turns recommending a book for the other to read out of our respective libraries. We decided to restart this tradition recently, finding that it was a good starting point for discussion of not only books, but also concepts that were conveyed by the books. In a sense, it is not dissimilar to watching a movie or television show together--maybe we could call it our own personal Oprah's Book Club?

Jill got to pick the opening salvo, and handed me Jane Smiley's MOO. I love comedy, and books that convey humor are hard to write and hard to find as a reader. After you've exhausted P.G. Wodehouse, Thorne Smith, and James Branch Cabell, where do you go? It is always a pleasure to find another book in which an author goes out on a limb for comedy, and even if it doesn't entirely succeed, it often makes for great reading. Smiley, a past winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and quickly making a name for herself for deeply serious books, has written a winner in MOO. The comedy here is a strange mixture of satire, situation, and salaciousness, all tied together by a marvelous craftswoman who can switch viewpoints at the turn of a page and juggle five plotlines at one time.

MOO is set in a mythical midwestern University, a stereotypical Agriculture and Engineering college that are the mainstays of the feed and breed states. In this college, you have the secretary to the Provost who actually runs the college, only passing on letters or memos that she decides the Provost should see; the Assistant English professor, hoping to make tenure, making the rounds of the Eastern writing workshops and trying desperately to make the requisite number of publications; the new foreign language instructor, a beautiful, dark woman who sometimes claims Costa Rican heritage although she was born and raised in Los Angeles; the boy fresh from the farm, who is happy to find a work-study assignment as the caretaker for an experiment to see how large a pig can grow; a gaggle of girls, gathered together by the vagaries of the University housing office as roommates in the subsidized dorm; and Chairman X and his companion, who most people mistake as his wife since they have lived together for over 20 years and have two children. There's more, though: the researcher who loves the song-and-dance of getting funding, but is anxious when it comes to actually performing; his live-in, an adjunct instructor at the Vet school (located a few miles from the main campus) in charge of the horse herd; the local farmer who's got the invention in his barn that will revolutionize agriculture, that is as long as he can keep it from Big Ag and the Government spies; and the Provost's brother, who has decided that it is time for him to marry, so he picks a likely candidate from among the women at the local church. Although the book is humorous, and sometimes the characters are too, the reality of the situation is closer to home than many of your television situation comedies. Smiley has an incredible way of opening up the characters to you, showing their hopes and fears and foibles, that make them seem like real people.

Academics who don't mind being the center of the joke and former students who can remember their college days fondly should both find MOO enjoyable and rememberable. Having gone to a similar small University myself (Colorado State), it was like visiting the old stomping grounds where the names had been changed to protect the guilty. Jill liked this book enough that she bought more by Smiley--and I suspect that one of these will be a future choice of hers for me to read.

Rating:
Summary: Take Notes
Review: Moo is an accurate and engrossing portrayal of the hierarchies of both faculty and students at a Midwestern university. However, while Smiley treats the reader to one of her most light-hearted novels, with devious love triangles and surprisingly earnest interspecies bonding, she inevitably creates an enigma of subplots that boggles the mind. With a little patience this is a rewarding read.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining but confusing
Review: Moo is a satirical, multi-level portrait of a Midwestern agricultural university. It is an enjoyable story with many loosely related plots and subplots. The book also has many characters, from students, instructors and the provost to a hog (part of a secret experiment on campus). I found myself confused at times while reading Moo, and often I had to go back to look up previously mentioned characters and situations. Overall I liked reading Moo and would recommend it. I think people with first-hand experience in a similar university environment may especially enjoy it.

Rating:
Summary: College
Review: 1. What is the text about? Life at college from many different angles-men, women, professors, students, administrators, staff. Deliberately "cross-sectional"
2. What is good about it? The book's humor dominates, but Smiley also delivers a insightful (if gentle) picture of the college landscape.
3. What is not so good about it? The book never focuses on one particular character; she does women better than men...and older folks better than students. It wasn't a problem for me, though.
4. Who might like it? Fans of episodic fiction; David Lodge fans; mid-Western fiction fans;
5. Personal bias: I teach college. I like reading about college.

Rating:
Summary: Terrific satire of the academic life
Review: I'm not only the child of college professors, I'm also the sister and sister-in-law of two. Plus I was managing ed of my college newspaper and worked in its PR office for two years after graduation. Trust me, this is dead on, while maintaining some compassion for those trapped in the ivory tower.

Rating:
Summary: Lost Interest early
Review: This book was required for my English 350 class and the only reason I finished it was so that I could pass the test on it. There are far too many characters who do not get developed. Smiley attempts to develope these characters even after 300 pages into it. I did not like this book at all.

Rating:
Summary: Laghing till the cows come home......
Review: A satire of life at a large Midwestern agricultural school (much like the one Smiley herself labors at, this book is on the mark on several levels. On the one hand, it just feels right--the characters are caricatures but nonetheless feel realistic in their foibles and follies. The feel of 80's college life is also right on.

There are a few rough spots, and the book could have been better edited to shorten it a bit, but overall it's a quite humorous and entertaining breach fare type read.

Rating:
Summary: Hilarious intellectual ghetto
Review: This is the story of an AG midwestern university campus. It is a self-enclosed institution, in other words an intellectual and social ghetto. The author explores this reality along two lines. First she adopts a multiple point of view approach that explodes the unity of the campus into varying and antagonistic approaches. We enter that way all kinds of inner conflicts captured from all kinds of personal points of view. It is a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces scattered over a wide table. We have to reconstruct the whole picture and this is both funny and inspiring. But, since a ghetto is supposed to be penetrated by the outside world that surrounds it, the second approach deals with all kinds of intrusions from outside. The first intrusion is that of a big corporation that dictates its rules by donating money and making the university rich. All kinds of compromises are thus imposed and accepted because of all the security and the fringe benefits or percs this intrusion brings along. The second intrusion is political and comes from the Governor of the state who decides, out of hostility against the politically motivated professors, to cut on the budget. This creates a real panic on the campus when everyone discovers that programs and careers are just perishable goods that can dry out overnight and disappear at dawn. The trick here is to bring around a change of mind of the Governor who cancels his own decisions and everything comes back to normal, that is to say overspending and carelessness. This novel is witty and very funny due to the various personalities and conflicts it describes and animates for us. The core of this novel is the tragic life of a pig, or hog if you prefer, who is a clandestine passenger on the campus that has cost one quarter million dollars and who dies of a heart attack when he finally gets the opportunity to escape. In other words it is impossible to escape this ghetto, to live outside this ghetto once you have taken roots in it. And the metaphor of the hog is just the best metaphor you can imagine for such a campus, a hog that has been raised only on a fattening diet that makes him so big that he can't even walk. Fatten university campuses with money and they become inoffensive to the outside world because they are self-contained and totally irrelevant for the outside world, or nearly.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Rating:
Summary: When fiction can be as strange as truth
Review: This is a work of fiction, a mischevious send-up of academic life. But anyone who has done significant time at a state university (especially a land-grant college) will also recognize it as an at times penetratingly serious work of cultural anthropology. Through the book's screwball plots and characters, Smiley educates as well as entertains us with the foibles, prejudices, joys, problems, hypocrisies, and resentments that animate university life.

This tale is really a series of allegories based on its characters: the self-important senior faculty member who's perpetually busy being busy; the tenured deadwood prof who long ago gave up publishing and now enjoys an abundance of time for cooking, gardening, and entertaining; the provost who must negotiate between "the university's professed goal of excellence in every area" and his own "secret goal of adequacy in most areas"; the activist who champions abstract and far-away causes and neglects his own home life and community; the Babbitts in the state legislature; the students who manage to pop out after four years "intact and undigested, unaffected by critical thinking, the scientific method, empirical inquiry, or reasoned disputation"; and, of course, the omnipotent secretary (who happens to be a lesbian and the only character in the book with a monogamous relationship and harmonious sex life).

Smiley's droll satire can be biting and seemingly understated at the same time. My only complaint was that the narrative gets a little bogged down in places. The book may not hold as much charm for those who are uninterested in academic culture. But most readers will come away appreciating Smiley as a top-notch writer.

Rating:
Summary: A Disappointing Read
Review: Though I have enjoyed Jane Smiley's short stories and novellas, I had trouble finishing this lengthy book. The cast of characters is large, but the characterization lacks depth. As a satire, it does hit the mark at times. I spent several years working for a Midwestern university, and I recognize some of the faculty and administration types she depicts. But...the plot drags and reading becomes an effort. Smiley has a great talent for psychological insight and sophisticated, multi-layered depiction of characters and relationships, but that hardly comes into play in this book. It feels sadly dated as well. The concerns of the late 1980's already seem quaint.