Jane Smiley's farcical depiction of a Midwestern agricultural university is very funny at times. But there are too many characters to keep track of, certainly too many to care about. Many characters and two hundred pages could have been deleted from this novel. It was a chore to plow through (no pun).

Smiley was a college professor for 15 years at Iowa State and she utilizes her experience to construct a humorous and cynical book that pretty much skewers her brethren. Teachers at Moo University are portrayed, for the most part, as selfish schemers bleeding the system. Money talks-- salary, grants, free travel and $100 lunches (in the 1980's). In Moo we see little teaching and much fundraising. Moo U is a snake-pit rife with opportunists and career-climbers.

At the center of the novel is Earl Butz, an overweight hog who's "job" is to eat and eat and eat and to remain alive as long as possible. Since all hogs are eventually butchered, Earl will test that norm. This eat-fest is a secret academic study funded by taxpayers (Moo is a State school). Certainly this hog, forever at the trough, symbolizes Smiley's cynical view of Academia. That depresses me. So the book is funny, depressing and much too long.

Feeling guilty that this is contributing to my 2024 reading goal, as I DNFed this book around the 25% mark.

This is not to discourage anyone else from reading it, it just was not my cup of tea.

I first read Moo years ago, but on randomly picking it off my shelf recently, found it still an enjoyable story. Moo is a humorous look at life in an agricultural university in the American Midwest, part soap opera, part satire. Covering the 1989-90 academic year, some details are a bit dated, but the personality clashes and political wrangling are surely still relevant. The characters will be recognisable to anyone who has ever had a brush with higher education. Recognisable enough, that when the book was published in 1995, readers at many different institutions claimed it was about their school.

This is a character-based, situation-driven novel, and the cast of characters is rather large, including faculty, students, staff, and some members of the surrounding community, with overlapping and intersecting threads. The characters are not all equally interesting, but among the more entertaining are:

t•tChairman X, Marxist head of the Horticulture department, who wants to kill the dean and who lives with Lady X (a.k.a. Beth), the woman everyone—including their four children—assumes is his wife,
t•tMrs Walker, the admin, who knows where the bodies are buried, and who actually runs the place,
t•tCecelia Sanchez, assistant professor recently arrived from Los Angeles, and who feels out of place in a sea of lily-white faces,
t•tLoren Stroop, a local eccentric farmer trying to interest the university in the machine he invented and believes will revolutionise farming, and
t•tBob Carlson, a lonely sophomore who works for the University taking care of the hog at the centre of an experiment to see how big a hog will grow if left alone to eat as much as it wants.

That hog, Earl Butz (named after Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture whose policies pushed the United States towards large-scale corporate farming) is a major character in his own right. This is how Smiley describes him:

n  Earl’s business was eating, only eating, and forever eating… Earl Butz was a good worker, who applied himself to his assigned task with both will and enjoyment… At Christmas, Bob had purchased some large, sturdy red toys…They had been Earl Butz’ first toys, and he played with them when he could fit the time into his work schedule.n

There is a list of the characters here. I wish I had had that the first time I read it; I sometimes found myself flipping backwards, thinking Helen, now which one was she, and who is she sleeping with?

The main plot, such as it is, is about funding. The governor threatens budget cuts; the administration scrambles to find additional funding from corporate sponsors. Belt tightening ripples through the system, triggering infighting and endangering some already precarious balancing acts. The novel also explores tensions within the university over what, exactly, it purports to be, as faculty yearning towards the more prestigious Ivy League schools threaten to drag the university away from its locally-relevant, vocational-education roots.

Moo is funny but warm, leaning more towards situational comedy and small tragedies than biting satire, although there is that, too. Don’t expect a riveting page-turner; approach it as a leisurely and Dickensian slice of life in academia. Some threads do follow bizarre, delusional, or abrasive characters, but most of them are fairly ordinary, relatable people. Their stories are told with streaks of empathy and melancholy woven in.

This review was first published on This Need to Read.

(As of October 2013, my arts center is selling a SIGNED first-edition, first-printing copy of this book at reseller eBay. [See our entire rare-book collection at (cclapcenter.com/rarebooks).] Below is what I wrote for the listing's description.)

One of the most common questions out there among people who collect "hypermodern" first editions (books less than thirty years old) is how to best guess which living authors to be collecting in the first place; and while only the future will show us which writers of our times will still be read and venerated a century from now, it's almost never a bad bet to target an author both popular and award-winning, pick the most famous title of their career, then purchase a signed first edition, first printing of it in immaculate shape. Take this signed first-edition copy of Moo, for example, by the still active Jane Smiley, first put out in 1995; for while it's her 1991 Pulitzer winner A Thousand Acres with the flashier reputation (thanks to the Hollywood Oscarbait adaptation), many people consider her next novel after that to be the best-written of her career, and the one that she will ultimately be remembered for. The ultimate "backbiting among philandering academes at a large Midwestern university" novel, which became virtually a cottage industry unto itself in the 1990s, the novel has been described by more than one passionate fan as Dickensian in tone; and as Smiley has elaborated on in subsequent interviews, one of her main points is to show that a university is not an isolated ivory tower but a living reflection of the often small town where it exists, which is why state schools from Wisconsin to Missouri and beyond have claimed with semi-pride that elements of this book were based on their campuses. (For what it's worth, Smiley lives in Ames, Iowa and teaches at the large Iowa State University, but she claims that the novel is not based on her real life in any way whatsoever.) In the future, there's a good chance that Smiley will be known as sort of the George Eliot of the Postmodernist Age, someone who was able to use small towns and middle-class societies to comment astutely on the entire national culture she found herself in; and while no rare book can be 100 percent guaranteed to go up in price in the future, certainly this has at least a strong chance of doing so, a perfect choice for a long-term investor just making their first acquisitions now at a young age.

Abandoned this book. Picked it up at a book sale a few months ago. The description seemed awesome. Started reading it at the beginning of the year but the characters are so bland, and they're so many of them, and by the middle of the book you still fail to care about anything going on. So much going on yet it doesn't matter. It's just random people doing random things and going to random places. All of us just walk and go to places and do things, don't we? That's how humans are. And then we go to some more places. And sometimes we read books. And then we abandon them like this book. Because what we do is a mystery. The result of what we do. We pull strings in an invisible world and do not know the effects. I can't see past random people doing random things sometimes. Actually, why was I reading this book? Because I found it at a book sale? Because it seemed to coincide with my interests? Why did I only read it now? Why am I writing this now? Why did I abandon this book? As I read it I thought that we are just a bunch of people and it's hard to get through it all. It's just things happening. And then something else happens. And then something else happens. And then you're sitting on a bench. And for some reason out of some universal joke the bird leaves. Because it ate some bad bread and it got sick. But then you're stuck there on that bench. And the other birds are so far away. Look at all those ducks. Look, that one's landed in the puddle darling. Under that weird statue where the inside is a dome, a silver dome, and look out into the stars and reflect on all that you missed? Did it have a meaning, a purpose? Why does it matter when you missed it? And then the stars shine back. LOOK AT THE ISLAND. Wow what a beautiful island. And all those trees over there. Look at the trees. There's statues too. All those people on that island and they're all so happy aren't they. Random people going to random goddamn places. It's the statue again. We're at the waters. I can only see the ducks by the waterfront. The seagulls come but they only want food. Are we still hunter gatherers as we're taken on these metal ships into the island? And then I hear a plane fly. I say I want to live here. It's quite a nice place. Look at all those people. They all have those stories but I don't feel like getting through them. Because it's just random people and why does it matter. I am only interested in the birds. They seem to know what they're doing aren't they. Well, are people really happy as they seem out in the streets? Is this all just a colossal mistake? What if we've missed everything like some sort of story. I abandoned this story because I found it boring. There's so much dead space isn't there. Those ducks at the bench and all those things they do. Actually the ducks are always fed. Yet they still ask for bread. You know it doesn't make sense, doesn't it. The birds. Look at the birds in the sky, the blue sky, only it's winter now, can it please be spring.

I can't quite pinpoint the problem, but I'm just not excited to continue reading. I have enjoyed the student stories, but am a bit bored by the faculty stories which, at least up to halfway though, seem to be predominant.

Read this when I was in college since our professor (an eccentric waif) suggested that we look at it. Ah, the joys of academia.

I love satires & satires about academic institutions are among my favorites so I wasn't surprised to find myself enjoying this one. However, perhaps my expectations were too high after reading the powerful A Thousand Acres last year -- this novel doesn't reach that same level.

3.5 stars rounded up. Smiley aims for satire by virtue of breadth, rather than depth. By trying to tell the intersecting stories of so many different personalities across a university campus, she's hoping to make some kind of statement about the institution as a whole. And she . . . sort of succeeds, but not as well as she might have done.

This book reminds me of J.K. Rowling's "The Casual Vacancy," in which having a glut of characters that, at times, can be hard to keep straight ultimately doesn't matter because the propulsive force of the plot carries the reader along through any confusions. Smiley similarly tries to create an enticing plot that foreshadows big climaxes and does a good job of keeping most of the characters distinct and moving across the many threads of action. But she ultimately whiffs on her climaxes, fizzling on the first two involving the demise of Earl Butz and the plot by Trans America to use the university as its R&D arm and destroy the cloud forest in Costa Rica--neither goes anywhere nor seems to trigger any kind of deeper introspection, either among the characters or the reader. And then her final climax literally gets titled "Deus Ex Machina" and feels entirely too pat and neat a happy ending for most.

Nevertheless, the first 70% of the book is fairly entertaining and marks an interesting waypoint in the genre of satirizing American higher education, catching the shift into the more modern neoliberal institutions occurring at the end of the 1980s after the era of campuses as radical laboratories in the 1960s. But it also reminds us that the industrial/corporate ties of universities far pre-date the modern era, with early extension/land grant models enmeshing American universities in the world of business from the very beginning.

Ultimately it's entertaining for what it is and you do come to feel fond of many characters, even if they never wholly occupy your heart or challenge your preconceptions or assumptions with any searing depth.

Some parts of this book are tedious to read, but as a whole the book forms a cohesive story made up of a large cast of characters each with their own little story and motivation, and it is the clashing of their motivations that drive the novel. The narrator is tongue-in-cheek but emotionally detached enough that the characters able able to appear flawed in a human way. By the time I finished reading this, I felt a bit melancholic because I have spent 1+ month with these characters and the end of this book felt like the series finale of a nice TV show.

A good dissection of academic types...but I have to say I much prefer Richard Russo and most especially David Lodge (but then I do have British leanings...sometimes think I'm a misplaced British person myself).

I do like this quote, however (being an academic secretary myself):

Over the years, Mrs. Loraine Walker’s vision of the campus had changed. The collection of stone buildings had evolved, in her mind, into a web of offices where secretaries sat under bright lights and now and then, much more dimly, sat administrators whose grasp on things was tenuous at best.

Perfect timing for me to read this satire about higher education as I work on my own novel with a similar theme. Full disclosure: I participated in a writing residency at Brevard College, studying under Jane Smiley, and she was a fabulous instructor, so I am partial to her work since that time. One of the things I like about her work is its variety. I also love her ability to portray the inner life of animals so that we can relate to them yet still see, smell, feel their animal nature. In this book she gifts us with the tragic character of the hog, Earl Butz, whose "job" it is to stuff himself. Oh, my, what a wonderful and compelling character. The most sympathetic of them all, which, I think, is Smiley's intent.

Smiley seems to have a bucket list approach to writing, wanting to challenge herself, not wanting to repeat the same style. This is certainly a very different book than her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, and hasn't been as critically acclaimed, but in some ways I like it better, probably because of the satiric wit, and her ability to meld the tragic with the comic, which is my favorite kind of writing.

Ultimately, the book is comic (the last section begins with a chapter entitled "Deus ex machina"), and ends with a wedding. Ah, I see, I guess I'm a little slow--A Thousand Acres (King Lear)--Shakespearean tragedy; Moo (Ends with a wedding)--Shakespearean comedy.

Clever!