I read this too long ago to make for a good review, but what I do recall is that immediately upon finishing I sent it to my friend, Jas. She and I used to talk about how in high school we pictured ourselves at university sitting around in coffee shops talking philosophy and such (perhaps even wearing black turtlenecks) and then we got to university and... Well, it was underwhelming. Something about this book struck a chord with me at the time.

I technically didn't finish this book. I have a love hat relationship with it. In parts it was very funny to me, and other parts dragged. The writing for me was clean but a bit intricate. The stories about academia were interesting and ironic and to my newbie ear rung true. My biggest beef is that there are so many main characters (about 20) who all have interconnections between them. The story doesn't have a straight narrative and I would constantly loose the thread. Finally about half way through I downloaded from wikipedia the list of all the characters with a sentence or two of their connection: Bill is the dean of agriculture, married to Alice, and recently having an affair with Jane. And so on. Now it's probably my bad memory for names but I think a book like this should have a cast of characters page if you have any prayer of enjoying it.

Easily the funniest book I have ever read. And a campus novel on top of that? Can’t be beat. A stellar commentary on education, people, politics, and college life

I must admit, when I first read this, I thought it rather boring. It took reading Horse Heaven to find my appreciation for the author's style. Now, with every time I read it, I love it more. I still occasionally get confused by all the characters, but I admire the way Smiley makes the place and the story still come together again. The whole is actually less than the sum of its parts here, which is not a bad thing, the parts are just too rich for the whole to live up to them. It's a book to be read slowly and savoured.

Jane Smiley is a spectacular writer. I just finished Theroux and it did feel like he was born to be a writer, but born to be a writer doesn't necessarily mean you should be. It felt like it was in his genes to write. He needed to write, which didn't mean he did it well. Smiley however, everything just flows out of her pen so effortlessly. It's never overwritten. The writing is even. There's no jarring switches in tone like you had in Theroux. Everything is of a piece. Her ability to juggle 20 characters is extraordinary. You have one scene and you're just going in and out of the heads of different characters and it doesn't feel stilted or unnatural. It's funny you said you didn't care about the characters because have you looked at your booklist? This is not badly written science fiction. It's a tour de force. Of course this is a descendent of Dickens, Laxness and those epic Scandinavian, Icelandic tomes, which Smiley has always been a proponent of. There's just nothing she can't write. I've always felt she's best writing in the 1st person. 1000 Acres and Good Faith just swept me away. I always felt that she doesn't fully inhabit her 3rd person narratives. You get that here too, but the momentum just takes you along.

Wow. This book took me a looooong time to read. It was sort of in the Elena Ferrante school of long reads, in that the prose and plotting is fairly dense, and takes a close read to get through it without losing too much of the narrative. Moo University is a midwestern school with a specialty in agriculture-related programs, but also includes other departments. The stories are split between professors, administrators, support staff and students (and one pig). Mostly, they don't intersect much, except the staff stories are fairly intertwined, while the student stories are somewhat separate. Frankly, I had a hard time keeping them straight, as chairmen, provosts, deans, and profs sort of blurred together, and many of them are in relationships, both with each other and with various spouses. The two subplots that unite them and underlie all the narratives have to do with a) an agricultural machine designed and built by a highly paranoid farmer who doesn't have any direct connection to the university (though he is trying to get an administrator interested in his invention); and b) a plot by an administrator to invest in (or otherwise work with) a large company that plans to destroy a forest in Costa Rica. It is quite an ingenious (and sort of tragic) intertwining of things that all come to a head and end up affecting every one of the characters. Even the pig (whose name is Earl Butz, which is apropos of nothing but deserves a mention). Jane Smiley does not disappoint, and this book is considered a masterwork of the academic fiction subgenre for a reason.

Moo by Jane Smiley, included on The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... list, in the Comedy Section
9 out of 10


This novel is a complex fresco, with multiple interesting characters, from the reviled, and obnoxious Dr. Lionel Gift, the economics professor who is so corrupt and vicious that he proposes that The Transamerica Corporation that sponsors him starts digging under the biggest cloud rain forest left, in Costa Rica, to get the gold from there, no matter what happens to the environment, which when we talk about gold involves cyanide and a massive pollution that would compromise that rain forest, unless it is stopped.

Arlen Martin is the rich man who controls Transamerica, and will do anything to get money, no matter what the consequences for the planet, humanity will be and he has ex- president Bolsanaro, the likes of Trump that help in such circumstances, no matter how monstrous the project will be, damn the Amazon forest and anything else for that matter, climate deniers and monsters that they are…
Chairman X is one of those opposing the project, he is the head of the Horticulture Department, a veteran rebel, who has had a history of protesting and embracing leftist ideas, he lives in an open relationship with Lady X, but at one point, he comes across Cecilia Sanchez, a first year assistant professor from Los Angeles – she would claim some connections with Costa Rica, exaggerated to please the Chairman, who becomes enamored with that alleged connection – and the two have a very carnal relationship, intense, consuming, but ultimately not very fulfilling, which is causing estrangement from his partner and the four children they have together – the Chairman will eventually attack dean Nils Harstad because he hates him and on account of the role played in the rain forest debacle.

Nils Harstad is an outré character, who has a twin brother, Provost Ivar Harstad, the former decides to marry a woman from his church, Marly Hellmich, and have six children with her, an issue that becomes complicated first and then, spoiler alert, he ends up inviting her…father to share the big house with him, after the initial rejection, Marly thinks twice and better about the offer, examines the wealth of the would be husband, the abrupt change in her material fortune and decides to accept the marital offer, however different she is from what the man had imagined, she is not twenty five and a virgin, she has a married truck driver for a lover and lives with her father, the latter having conditions of his own to impose on the brothers, Marly’s parent is quite a demanding individual, who thinks the union is wrong.
Dean Nils Harstad is approached by a paranoid farmer, Loren Stroop, to support the latter’s plans for a visionary new harvesting, agricultural machine that in fact plants, it does not do harvesting, the first description was wrong, and so is the rest of it, but in the end, it may not see the light of day, due to unforeseen events http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u...

Loren Stroop is adamant that the CIA, FBI and ag businesses (by which he means the big agricultural conglomerates) are watching him, and presumably everyone else, and they are determined to prevent his invention from materializing, because it will affect their plans and control of the food production…he had used the invention, we learn from a neighbor, and the results have been very good, even if Stroop is known to use very little seed, the problem is that this machine is hidden in a barn and nobody can see it, the man is in two minds about giving details to the dean Nils Harstad, until perhaps it is too late.
Earl Butz is a…boar kept for an experiment, hidden and kept secret from the rest of the university by professor doctor Bo Jones, one of the exotique figures populating this comedy, who will end up spending on this project from the funds of the institution quite a few hundred thousand dollars, a vast sum that will create a furore, especially given that due to clashes, protests and other incidents, the educational outfit comes under fire, is criticized by the governor of the state that cuts funding drastically (only to change his mind when he learns about the alleged valuable invention of Loren Stroop)
The boar is well cared for by Bob Carlson, who gives him enormous quantities of food, in order to see where that will take the animal, this is indeed the object of the trial, and the young man sees and cares for the pig six times a day – when he is on a date, he suddenly stands up and travels to his duty, in such a mysterious fashion that the girl will eventually follow and expose him in his minding of the boar, to his surprise and fury – scratching the animal and never leaving the premises expect for once…

Earl Butz is growing so fat and large that he feels pain in his legs, the life he lives in this undercover refuge does not look enticing, eventually, the Old Meats part of the university is to be demolished and when the bulldozers arrive, they hit on the pen of the boar, breaking down walls and liberating the animal that, after an initial hesitation, starts running out in the open, until he cannot face this effort anymore…
The satire is very effective, and we see various characters we may recognize from our experience as students, or from books we have read, such as the marvelous The Lecturer’s Tale by James Hynes http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/05/t... which describes what happens in another institution of high education, where Nelson Humboldt is the Lecturer and hero, keen on writing a book on the Not So Bad anti-heroes in American stories, from Harry Armstrong of Rabbit Run – and the consequent trilogy, I am reading again Rabbit at Rest, after reading twice the whole four novels in the series) to The Sportswriter by John Ford and through James Dixon, the protagonist of one of the best chefs d’oeuvres that you can encounter, Lucky Jim by Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis

Moo is a wild ride, with laughs and amusing episodes…I see now that I have rated A Thousand Acres, which has brought the author the Pulitzer Prize with just three stars out of five, so moo is an improvement in my book…still, this is nowhere near the joy brought in by Lucky Jim http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/05/l...

bad luck with books lately :/ too many characters for me to care about any of them

Loved it. Quite witty. And if you work anywhere in higher education, you will relate in some way or other.

A deliciously wry poke at academia with all its petty departmental politics; personal rivalries, insecurities and obsessions; funding shenanigans, political interference and Big Corporate machinations.

Jane Smiley's sixth novel portrays a third rate MidWestern university that has its basis in agricultural sciences but also offers a bizarrely disparate range of other subjects, from physics to creative writing, English and modern languages. This makes for fertile ground for different story strands and characters. It is built on stereotypes, for sure, but there's plenty that's - somewhat horrifyingly! - true to life. I got a little bogged down in a few places but was glad I persisted as the strands of the story pull together in an entertaining (and slightly unexpected) fashion at the end.

Don't expect to warm to most of the characters since they are either too eccentric or too lightly drawn to make the reader mind about their fate (though there are some exceptions - Helen is a delight, for instance). I usually love to identify with characters in a story, but in this instance I didn't mind - the characters serve the satire beautifully and that was enough.

It wasn't laugh out loud funny, unlike some other academic satires (for instance McCall Smith's Portuguese Irregular Verbs which had me in fits). More along the lines of sympathetic wincing, particularly when the dreadful and all too plausible Dr Gift was in the scene. But it was smart and amusing and over the top. It even features a riot. Just the thing for a few chilly autumn evenings. And Jane Smiley's lovely turns of phrase lend style to even the most mundane topic.

The only other Smiley I have read is 1000 Acres (and that back in the 90s when it came out...despite my husband lamenting the theft of the Lear story). I have had this on my list forever.. as a former grad student of UW and still resident of Madison WI as well as a graduate of Grinnell College (small college in small IA town) AND a high school grad from a small town in IL, I can claim some knowledge about the midwest, the rural farming communities, and academia.

Unfortunately, this is slightly better than 3 stars, but not much. Smiley tries to be funny and at times she evokes Russo's Straight Man and DFW's Infinite Jest (if only with all the corporate sponsorships), but overall the novel was just not satisfying.

I liked the variety and number of characters. Frequently I complain that books limit themselves to so few people that we get the impression that a novelist really thinks that there are only 5 people on campus. Smiley does not do that here, she presents biographical info for several students, lots of professors and administrators and their secretaries. She even touches on the animals (Earl was one of my favorite characters) as well as the townspeople. Others have complained that they were confused, but I think that all of the people were individuals (if a little stereotyped).

I also liked that Loren Stroop was really the only productive individual in the novel. Despite his paranoia, he did have a worth invention and he was important, while everyone else is just a ridiculous icon.

My biggest complaints were simply that Smiley addressed too many topics (environmentalism, feminism, capitalism, fall of communism) and too blatantly forced her agenda. This was not a character piece (or even a multi-character piece); it was not a plot driven story; it was a tirade against human intellectual masturbation and the theories that we blindly and unquestionably support. I was also disappointed that she had to wrap everything up nicely in the end..Cecelia and Tim are friends/dating; Beth and X get married; Ivar and Father move in together. It was all just too much Disney for me in the end.

That all said she did have a few moments of truth and humor:
“It was well know to all members of the campus population that other, unnamed groups reaped un imagined monetary advantages in comparison to the monetary disadvantages of one’s own group, and that if funds were distributed fairly, according to real merit, for once, some people would have another think coming.”

“faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.”

“There wasn’t a single man looking at her. Looking at her had turned them all into boys. This was an aspect of Barbie-hood that Mary had never given any thought to, that Barbie created Ken, anatomically incorrect to the very core of his brain, where he understood as well as he understood his own name that Barbie was inviolable.”

There are a few moments, but in general this 400ish page book felt 1000 pages and was probably more work than pleasure.

I laugh out loud every time I reread this book. Smiley is one of the great masters who writes about systems as much as about people. In Moo, each character’s point of view comes alive with an incredibly specific weltanschauung — economic, religious, zoological — and it's a joy to move around the kaleidoscope of these different sensibilities.