It's ok. The book drops you into the micro-universe of a midwest state university called Moo University. Smiley uses an ensemble, soap-opera approach to the book. The focus shifts from over half a dozen characters, leaving the reader lost in the not so intriguing cast. There is wit, irony and great scenes, but the stitching is loose and disconnected. The reader can't get purchase on any one character or theme. The book covers the 1990 school year. The only global event with impact, and even then only slight, on this insular academic campus is the impending fall of the Soviet Union.

We learn a bit about the politics of a state university, as well as the funding and grant processes. We see how big business can impact higher learning. Mostly its a muddling of not so dynamic students and faculty making their way in their everyday lives. There is intrigue over an environmental scandal and some curious genetic tests, but these mostly come to nothing. Life goes on and Moo University continues to navigate its forgettable existence.

I wanted to like this book. Without a central character or a driving or connecting crisis, this book falls away as a modestly interesting experimental writing project by a talented writer. I did enjoy the massive university pig Earl and the creative writing student Bob, but these two bright spots were not enough to carry this book out of the "surely there must be a more consequential (or enjoyable) book you can read" classification.

I tend to have mixed feelings about novels about academia. On the one hand, I think academia is a rich subject for fiction, including satire. On the other hand, many novels about academia are so heavily satirical that the reader feels the authors must utterly hate academia and that there is evidently no redeeming it from its foibles and sins. As someone who has had almost entirely positive experiences with academia both as a student and, recently, as a professor, I find this thin and tiresome more than genuinely funny. After all, while academia has its absurdities and stupidities, so does any type of workplace. I tend to prefer academic novels such as Robertson Davies's Rebel Angels, which combines comedy and affection, to those like Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, which make every character look nasty.

Moo comes somewhere in the middle for me. It has a huge cast of characters and thus needs to be read in a short time so that the reader doesn't lose track of them. I tend to prefer novels that focus on a smaller number of major characters, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with this kind of grand overview of the lives of many. Some of the characters are likable, others not; I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of the secretary Mrs. Walker, because not only do good secretaries genuinely run things in universities and corporations, but Mrs. Walker, while authoritarian and manipulative, uses her power to improve the functioning and ethical nature of her university. I also enjoyed seeing how the freshman Keri, described as looking like a Barbie doll and someone expected to be rather superficial, gradually emerges as a quietly good-hearted, not at all superficial person. The hog Earl Butz and his keeper were also quite appealing, and Chairman X also had his merits. It's clear that the author doesn't scorn or hate most of her characters, even though many of them behave foolishly.

At the same time, many readers evidently find this a hilarious novel, whereas I merely chuckled now and then. I read along with interest but never with fascination or passion or delight. The author shows a keen understanding of many characters' psychology and inner workings, yet while I was sympathetic to many of them, I wasn't remarkably caught up in their lives or woes.

It's well constructed, interesting, and somewhat reminiscent of Dickens. I thought it was good and worth reading (it improved for me as I neared the end, too) but it's not a favorite.

Love this. Cast of characters is very diverse, all of them are interesting and involved in their own (sometimes overlapping) storyline. Written in a refreshing style with some different forms (trad. story type shi, memo's and letters, newspaper extracts, ...) so that you can just keep on reading till the end

Moo is a novel of academic satire set at a Midwestern agricultural university in the early 90s. It took me almost 200 pages to really get into the story, because there are so many characters it was a little bit of a challenge to remember their stories. Once I got into the book it was quite enjoyable and an accurate depiction of academia. The academic politics, regional politics, personal grudges, and manipulation felt realistic and were entertaining. The ending was also completely satisfying.

Anyone who has worked or taught in a university will appreciate this satirical novel set in an unnamed land-grant university in a Midwestern state with a strong resemblance to Iowa. Smiley, who manages to find the entire world in the cornfields of her native region, gets the personalities, idiosyncracies and bizarre internal politics of American academe exactly right in this book.

"Moo"the second time around"

I am a huge Jane Smiley, seldom missing announcements of any of her work. During a protracted complicated period of my life, I read the first volume of her trilogy, then had to stop reading much of anything for several months. I always knew, however, that her was waiting for me and was always encouraged and sustained by the thought. Recently, my obligations lessened,so went to the 11 books piled up and waiting. As I began the second volume which begins on the day following the last page of the previous book, I happily realized that I would have to start over. Doing so gave real pleasure following the independent movements of that vast Iowa clan.( Smiley rivals Tolstoy in the number on chAracters she can sustain in a novel.) Finishing the. Entire trilogy, my taste for J.S.'s works was not satisfied, so I went my library and pull down. It remains in my opinion the second best comic novel about academic life, surpassed only by "Straight Main."

It's interesting reading this right after Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man. While Bradbury's novel bemoans the effect student activism in the 70s seemed to be having on the functions of the university, Moo takes place in the post-Reagan 90s, and focuses on how the college counterculture has gradually given way to the corporatization of education, and how the university has gone from "A limited promise extended to a limited group" to "a vast network of interlocking wishes, some of them modest, some of them impossible, many of them conflicting, many of them complementary." There is one character, Chairman X, who could be the main professor from The History Man 20 years down the road, apopleptic at the fall of Communism, the spread of globalization, and his own inability to do anything to turn back the tide. Another character, economics professor Lionel Gift, is his Reaganite opposite, a fanatic for the free market who calls his students "customers" and doesn't mean anything pejorative by it.

But where Bradbury makes a lean (starved, even), pinpoint satire of changing social norms, Jane Smiley makes Moo part of a larger picture, taking us into the lives of individual students, professors, administrators, teaching assistants, and support staff. As with almost any novel taking a large, Dickensian view of things, some of these characters and situations are more satisfying than others. The chapters that center on Mary, a black Chicago transplant in the oppressively white Midwestern university, are quite effective; the chapters focusing on her roommates Sherri, Keri, and Diane less so. The adventures of the elderly twin senior administrators are generally loony in a fun way, the psychodrama of a spiraling marriage between a geneticist and an animal husbandry specialist, while well-done, is too tonally jarring. Aside from Gift and X, the characters are almost too well-rounded for their own good, without the caricaturist's touch that can help small characters in a big book stick in the memory. But Smiley writes deftly, with an easygoing wit that never loses track of the ideas behind the jokes.

I liked these ideas, and in particular enjoyed Smiley's insight that the state university, in attempting to widen its functions and become a prestigious academy of higher learning, is giving short shrift to the unsexy vocational majors that actually make the university relevant to the majority of the taxpayers in the state. The professors and administrators want to make the university Ivy League Iowa, because it makes their positions more prestigious, but the state doesn't want to pay for that, so they cut funding, so the university looks to private industry to replace that funding in the short term, either unaware of what the consequences will be or too desperate to care. The needs of global corporations then push out the independent academics anyway, while making the pursuits of the university even less applicable to the daily lives of the people who still fund large portions of it with their taxes. Smiley's ability to show this vicious cycle of budget-cutting and privatization intruding into the stories of all the different characters is the most impressive thing about this book, and makes it worth reading. The comedy and characters, on the other hand, are what will make you want to keep reading.

I've already made this review too long, but I want to close with an appreciation of a character I know I will remember, one that makes me believe Jane Smiley (whose life is a mystery to me) has taught her share of creative writing courses. This character is Gary, who is taking a creative writing class, and has a crush on his roommate's girlfriend, and continues to write (and rewrite, and rewrite) a story of how the girl marries his roommate, regrets her life, and dies (hilariously and melodramatically each time). And as we see the story go through its endless, laborious drafts, we see that the writing gets better, the details less indulgent, the structure more interesting—and it’s all for nothing, because none of that changes the fact that the story, at its heart, is Gary writing about how this girl will never be happy because she'll never be with him.

As a former teacher, the sight of a student pursuing an idiotic thesis over multiple drafts, and being unable to see that it's the central concept that's the problem, is all too familiar. And as a student of creative writing classes, the student who is unable to stop inflicting his psychological and sexual hangups on his (almost always HIS) readers is equally recognizable, and there seems no way to inform him what an ass he's being without violating the generally-accepted boundaries of politeness. The world is stuck with Gary until he realizes what he's doing and learns to look outside himself, and the funniest and most cynical joke Smiley makes is showing how the modern American university, bastion of self-knowledge and cultivator of empathy, is utterly unequipped to help him out with this.

Probably, you aren't going to like this novel. It's hilarious and prescient and brilliant but odd. I think this is the sort of novel an author can only get away with after winning the Pulitzer. It's experimental and quirky. It's a writer's novel, meaning you perhaps need to be invested in questions of craft and point of view to stick with it, not because it's daunting or difficult, but because it takes a lot of strange turns. The central character is a pig. There is much ado about chickens. It's an academic novel, and a satirical one, but of an entirely different stripe, the sort of novel that can get published because your editor is willing to give you a bit of lassitude. I love that Jane Smiley used her Pulitzer currency this way. As always, I love Jane Smiley. If you work in the academic world, you will appreciate this book deeply.

DNF due to unacceptable levels of boredom.

This satire of a Midwestern campus does a respectable job of sending up a large, American midwestern land-grant university. Unfortunately it has a serious problem for a book of satire—like a Saturday Night Live skit that goes on much, much too long, the book just isn't funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, and not even wry smile funny.

Listen, Jane Smiley is a fucking straight-up genius, and MOO is a hilarious, intricate and brilliant send-up of academia. She effortlessly weaves together dozens of character viewpoints, all while keeping a sort of empathetic humor at a slow boil throughout all of it. It's really impressive.

It's also very interesting to me to see the very polarizing reviews of this book - on one hand, I can see how it's not that interesting to some people (it is, after all, set in an agricultural college in the early 1990s) but the author's voice and deftness seems irrefutable to me. Academia, capitalism, radical politics, love, fiction writing, farming, death - they're all tackled here with such precision and again, that pervasive, gentle humor. I loved this book much more than I was expecting.

Moo is a long, sprawling, satirical novel about an agriculture college. Parts of it were certainly funny, but there were many different characters who seemed to have equal weight. Bouncing from character to character didn't allow me time to really care for any of them, and most were unlikable. It wasn't my cup of tea, but I'm sure many will appreciate the scathing look at higher education and the way they're run.