Moo

Rating:
Summary: Hilarious and satirical
Review: How can the same author who wrote Thousand Acres flip into the voice behind Moo?? What a phenomenal talent...
Moo is a tour de force of satire on life at an agricultural university (known as Moo U., in the parlance) that scathingly leaves no cow pie unkicked. Smiley uses the hypocrisy, prejudice, and self-importance of the characters as a metaphor for our entire society. No one who reads this outrageous novel will ever forget Earl Butz, the Herculean pig that becomes such an obsession for more than one of the quirky characters that sometimes teeter on the edge of caricature. That quality and the fact that the whole charade seemed to go on about 100 pages too long is the only reason for 4 stars instead of 5.
A great book, nontheless.

Rating:
Summary: My favorite book!
Review: This is probably my all-time favorite book, and I reread it at least once a year...I am sad every time it ends! Smiley has written a hysterical satire of life among students, professors, and administrators on a Midwester college campus; as someone who's recently graduated from a school similar to Moo U., I can certainly relate. Characters are well, developed, quirky, and eccentric. They are somewhat exaggerated, but easy to imagine and relate to. And don't listen to any reviewers who tell you the cast is too large...the book was easy to follow.

The first time I read it, I found it a little slow to get into, but I persisted and encourage others to do the same. I would love to see another book with the same characters; I miss them and want to learn more!!!

Rating:
Summary: not impressed
Review: As others have mentioned "Moo" has an unwieldy cast of characters which make following each subplot difficult, as characters often fail to appear again for hundreds of pages. Though some characters are noteworthy - particular the pig Earl Butz and Smiley's grasp of adolescent dialogue is flawless, I wound up skimming until I reached the climax. Personally, I much prefer the author's less bulky books such as "Barn Blind" and "A Thousand Acres" not because I don't enjoy reading complexly plotted novels, but because I feel that if you have the knack of creating memorable characters, they deserve more "screen time" so to speak.

Rating:
Summary: Good but not great
Review: Smiley has written a good but not great academic novel. Moo bears some disturbing parallels to David Lodge's much better academic trilogy (Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work)---Lodge's work was written earlier and is frankly much better.
The characters, setting and plot should be familiar to anyone who has spent time in a university (the newly minted professor struggling to get a grip, the jaded older faculty, the endless and pointless committee meetings, the tensions between administrators and faculty and so on). The one fairly original aspect of Moo is Smiley's inclusion of undergraduate characters who are usually completely ignored in academic novels. Mary, an 18 yr old urban African American freshman put down in the middle of the cornfields is one of Smiley's best characters and I read the novel looking for her (alas, she is not a central character).
For Smiley fans (and I am one), the book is a disappointment (it can't compare to her fantastic epic, The Greenlanders) and for those who love academic novels, the book is only mildly good.

Rating:
Summary: A true-to-life college campus
Review:

Don't be fooled by the title of the book; a pig named Earl Butz (ring any bells?)--is the literal and physical focus of this book. Earl is stowed away in the geographic center of the campus, Moo University, and those moving around him (students, faculty, etc), oblivious to his existence, nevertheless move in rhythm to him. When Earl escapes during the demolition of his home and dies, the campus is so affected that his picture on the front page of the newspaper affects everyone's life.

Everyone will recognize some familiar characters in this book. There are the four freshman girls living together--Mary, Keri, Sherri and Dianne--each of whom is drastically different, but borrows the others' clothes anyway. Then there's Bob Carlson, who doesn't know how to socialize with anyone but Earl Butz. Gary has a crush on his roommate's girlfriend and eavesdrops whenever they fight. English professor Tim can't keep his attention focused on any one woman long enough to establish a real relationship. The secretary to the Provost doesn't hide the fact that she controls EVERYTHING on campus and off, including her girlfriend Martha. Economics professor Lionel Gift believes he's God's gift to Costa Rica, as well as the rest of the world, often dropping the fact that he's in "some Rolodex" at the New York Times to impress people. One farmer, a frequent visitor to the provost, believes the FBI, the CIA and the big ag companies are out to get him, so he wears a bulletproof vest to protect himself.

These characters, weaved in and out of each other's lives, bring a rural campus to life with scandal, betrayal, but most of all, humor. Though Moo's huge cast can be confusing at times, it's a must-read for anyone in or graduated from college that never fails to bring a smile to your face.

Rating:
Summary: not impressed
Review: As others have mentioned "Moo" has an unwieldy cast of characters which make following each subplot difficult, as characters often fail to appear again for hundreds of pages. Though some characters are noteworthy - particular the pig Earl Butz and Smiley's grasp of adolescent dialogue is flawless, I wound up skimming until I reached the climax. Personally, I much prefer the author's less bulky books such as "Barn Blind" and "A Thousand Acres" not because I don't enjoy reading complexly plotted novels, but because I feel that if you have the knack of creating memorable characters, they deserve more "screen time" so to speak.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting....but no more,
Review: Moo was certainly an interesting read, but it fell far short of the "hilarious" label given to it by many. Smiley creates some fairly interesting (there's that word again) characters and does a decent job of together weaving several plot lines, but if you go in to this with great expectations then prepare to be disappointed.

While Moo does hit a few softballs in satirizing the land grant university, there's not that much new here.

One thing that Moo does accomplish (albeit unintentionally) is to provide an excellent example of the skewed sense of reality held by most who toil in academia. Why would this be unintentional? Because it is not the warped viewpoint of a character in the novel that is most interesting, but rather that of the author herself. The best satirical criticism here hits an unintended target.

Rating:
Summary: Quirky and Adorable
Review: The characters in her book are quirky, adorable, and a pleasure to read about. The way she develops her characters and have them interact with one another is marvelous. Her sarcastic wit made me laugh out loud several times during reading. I thoroughly loved this book.

Rating:
Summary: Much needed skewering of heartland academia
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Take Notes
Review: Moo is an accurate and engrossing portrayal of the hierarchies of both faculty and students at a Midwestern university. However, while Smiley treats the reader to one of her most light-hearted novels, with devious love triangles and surprisingly earnest interspecies bonding, she inevitably creates an enigma of subplots that boggles the mind. With a little patience this is a rewarding read.