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3.47 AVERAGE
3.47 AVERAGE
I was really surprised that I didn't enjoy this as much as I did A Thousand Acres, but, well, there you have it. I felt like there were too many characters, too much buildup with too much delay in resolution, and, well, I guess the book simply didn't speak to me.
Interesting commentary on corporate sponsorships in the university.
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:
• Chairman 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,
• Mrs Walker, the admin, who knows where the bodies are buried, and who actually runs the place,
• Cecelia Sanchez, assistant professor recently arrived from Los Angeles, and who feels out of place in a sea of lily-white faces,
• Loren Stroop, a local eccentric farmer trying to interest the university in the machine he invented and believes will revolutionise farming, and
• Bob 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:
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.
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:
• Chairman 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,
• Mrs Walker, the admin, who knows where the bodies are buried, and who actually runs the place,
• Cecelia Sanchez, assistant professor recently arrived from Los Angeles, and who feels out of place in a sea of lily-white faces,
• Loren Stroop, a local eccentric farmer trying to interest the university in the machine he invented and believes will revolutionise farming, and
• Bob 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:
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.
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.
Hilariously funny to anyone who's ever worked in a University setting.
Well it took me over a month to read this, I am so insanely busy right now. It was ok, entertaining enough. I had a hard time remembering who the myriad of characters were though.
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 [a:P. G. Wodehouse|7963|P.G. Wodehouse|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1198684105p2/7963.jpg], [a:Thorne Smith|171139|Thorne Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1358230465p2/171139.jpg], and [a:James Branch Cabell|92665|James Branch Cabell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1207156655p2/92665.jpg], 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.
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 [a:P. G. Wodehouse|7963|P.G. Wodehouse|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1198684105p2/7963.jpg], [a:Thorne Smith|171139|Thorne Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1358230465p2/171139.jpg], and [a:James Branch Cabell|92665|James Branch Cabell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1207156655p2/92665.jpg], 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.
