Lionel Gift, whose only faith lies with the shifting gales of the all-powerful Market, lends his support to a secret project by jug-eared Texas billionaire Arlen Martin to mine gold from the world’s last virgin rainforest. Bo Jones’ clandestine experiment to test the limits of gluttony (yes, there is a metaphor operating here). Like money, for instance: money for English professor Tim Monahan’s imminent raise and promotion money that provost Ivar Harstad will have to raise to make up for the governor’s $7 million cuts to university funding money to feed Earl Butz, the hog that is Dr. The central characters in Moo are the faculty and staff of the university itself, many of whom spend their time preoccupied with things far removed from their proper province of education. Smiley might let you down in the end by refusing to give certain members of her pigheaded cast of characters their just desserts, but it’s a hell of a ride along the way. And racism, politics, love…īut damn if she doesn’t go for the whole hog (literally as it turns out) with this brilliant, good-natured, sprawling satire set in a fictional Iowa state university known as Moo U.
Oh, and let’s not forget the American system of education. Instead of tackling the inherent problems in our entire cultural ethos, she’s only chosen a modest slice of it to dissect, namely the 1980s. Well, perhaps Moo is Jane Smiley’s version of getting down to the basics. An intimate, toned-down, between-blockbusters, single-nighter of a book would have fit just perfectly in the Pulitzer Prize winner’s canon right about now.
This book review was originally published in the Baltimore Evening Sun on June 5, 1995.Īfter shoehorning a vast critique of Western patriarchal society into a single Iowa farm with her A Thousand Acres, you’d think Jane Smiley might take a bit of a breather.
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