Jane Smiley, a former academic, is pitch perfect in this subtle yet scathing account of academic life in a small Midwestern town. As a former graduate student who had more than his fill of graduate school, this book was both wonderful and horrifying to read. I recommend this book to anyone thinking of attending graduate school, or as a medicine for those still recovering from the absurdity of it.

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.

America's answer to David Lodge, Jane Smiley produced the campus novel par excellence with this witty evocation of a midwest agricultural university - having visited a number of these myself subsequently, the portrait is uncanny. It also includes a dubious economics professor as a major character.

Was ready to give up on this book around page 50 and again around page 100 but once I got halfway figured I needed to finish. The writing was fine but too many characters that made it confusing and I really didn't ever care about any of them. Realize this was satire and I did laugh now and again but most of the time I was just trying to judge when I would finish. The story itself is about the administrators, teachers and students at a mid-western university in the eighties. The grants and research that drive them end up almost ruining them but this was only one story. There were also romances and marriages and students finding themselves and farming intrigue -way too many threads. If you are into campus policies and power then this may be way funnier or true but I just couldn't get into it.

I love Jane Smiley. This isn't her best book, it's probably not even in her top 5, but it's still a delightful novel. I thought that my undergraduate alma mater had the prize for silliest college name (Slippery Rock University), but Moo University (Moo U) might take the cake.

My favorite character in this book, by far, was Earl Butz, the overfed pig. I haven't gotten so emotional involved in the story of pig since Wilbur. I was so interested in his fate that I didn't even realize until the end, the pig is a metaphor! Of course.

spent the entire time flicking back trying to figure out who the hell these characters are
(sad bc i bought this from sweet pickle book shop in nyc which was the cutest secondhand bookshop but this was a FLOP)

Just finished this, and feel like it was several hours I'm never going to get back. It had several promising story lines that ultimately went nowhere. I can't help but feeling like the author was reveling in her own cleverness, but ultimately had nothing to say.

I never knew . . . this was the first of my mom's I ever read. She's amazing, and you should buy it.

Such a fun book. It takes a while to get used to the shift in perspective:

DNF at 189 pages. This book was really well written in a lot of ways, and it had a lot of amusing moments. However, it is very literary in that the purpose of the book often seems to be to showcase the author's talents at the expense of the story. It became really tedious after a while, to the point that I just couldn't take it anymore. Time put it away for something that's a bit less of a slog.

this was a bit too episodic for my liking. but very funny in parts. and insightful. from my favourite chapter:

"It was well known among the citizens of the state that the university had pots of money and that there were highly paid faculty members in every department who had once taught Marxism and now taught something called deconstructionism which was only Marxism gone underground in preparation for emergence at a time of national weakness.

It was well known among the legislators that the faculty as a whole was determined to undermine the moral and commercial well-being of the state, and that supporting a large and nationally famous university with state monies was exactly analogous to raising a nest of vipers in your own bed.

It was well known among the faculty that the governor and the state legislature had lost interest in education some twenty years before and that it was only a matter of time before all classes would be taught as lectures, all exams given as computer-graded multiple choice, all subscriptions to professional journals at the library stopped, and all research time given up to committee work and administrative red tape. All the best faculty were known to be looking for other jobs, and this was known to be a matter of indifference to the state board of governors.

It was well known among the secretaries in every office and every department that the faculty and administrators could, in fact, run the Xerox and even the ditto machines. They were just too lazy to do so.

It was well known among the janitorial staff in every office that if you wanted to maintain your belief in human nature, it was better never, ever to look, even by chance, into any wastebasket, but to adopt a technique of lifting and twisting the garbage bag in one motion and tossing it without even remarking to yourself that was unusual in weight or bulk or odor.

[...:]
It was well known to all members of the campus population that other, unnamed groups reaped unimagined 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."

I really enjoyed reading this book. The vast panorama of characters is constantly giving us different points of view, keeping the story well-paced and interesting.

I liked Smiley's cynicism about the bureaucratic workings of a state university. Yes, higher education is a noble thing, but the purveyors of a higher education are often far less noble. In fact, they can be crass, vindictive and money-grubbing with few compunctions about throwing higher education under the bus in favor of the institution.

Smiley used two symbols that I loved. The first was the secret garden hidden in the very heart of campus which was destroyed. The second was poor old Earl Butz, the forgotten hog in the heart of campus, whose unforeseen and untimely appearance forced irrevocable changes to the university itself.