Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining but confusing
Review: Moo is a satirical, multi-level portrait of a Midwestern agricultural university. It is an enjoyable story with many loosely related plots and subplots. The book also has many characters, from students, instructors and the provost to a hog (part of a secret experiment on campus). I found myself confused at times while reading Moo, and often I had to go back to look up previously mentioned characters and situations. Overall I liked reading Moo and would recommend it. I think people with first-hand experience in a similar university environment may especially enjoy it.
Rating: 
Summary: College
Review: 1. What is the text about? Life at college from many different angles-men, women, professors, students, administrators, staff. Deliberately "cross-sectional"
2. What is good about it? The book's humor dominates, but Smiley also delivers a insightful (if gentle) picture of the college landscape.
3. What is not so good about it? The book never focuses on one particular character; she does women better than men...and older folks better than students. It wasn't a problem for me, though.
4. Who might like it? Fans of episodic fiction; David Lodge fans; mid-Western fiction fans;
5. Personal bias: I teach college. I like reading about college.
Rating:
Summary: Terrific satire of the academic life
Review: I'm not only the child of college professors, I'm also the sister and sister-in-law of two. Plus I was managing ed of my college newspaper and worked in its PR office for two years after graduation. Trust me, this is dead on, while maintaining some compassion for those trapped in the ivory tower.
Rating: 
Summary: Lost Interest early
Review: This book was required for my English 350 class and the only reason I finished it was so that I could pass the test on it. There are far too many characters who do not get developed. Smiley attempts to develope these characters even after 300 pages into it. I did not like this book at all.
Rating:
Summary: Laghing till the cows come home......
Review: A satire of life at a large Midwestern agricultural school (much like the one Smiley herself labors at, this book is on the mark on several levels. On the one hand, it just feels right--the characters are caricatures but nonetheless feel realistic in their foibles and follies. The feel of 80's college life is also right on. There are a few rough spots, and the book could have been better edited to shorten it a bit, but overall it's a quite humorous and entertaining breach fare type read.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious intellectual ghetto
Review: This is the story of an AG midwestern university campus. It is a self-enclosed institution, in other words an intellectual and social ghetto. The author explores this reality along two lines. First she adopts a multiple point of view approach that explodes the unity of the campus into varying and antagonistic approaches. We enter that way all kinds of inner conflicts captured from all kinds of personal points of view. It is a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces scattered over a wide table. We have to reconstruct the whole picture and this is both funny and inspiring. But, since a ghetto is supposed to be penetrated by the outside world that surrounds it, the second approach deals with all kinds of intrusions from outside. The first intrusion is that of a big corporation that dictates its rules by donating money and making the university rich. All kinds of compromises are thus imposed and accepted because of all the security and the fringe benefits or percs this intrusion brings along. The second intrusion is political and comes from the Governor of the state who decides, out of hostility against the politically motivated professors, to cut on the budget. This creates a real panic on the campus when everyone discovers that programs and careers are just perishable goods that can dry out overnight and disappear at dawn. The trick here is to bring around a change of mind of the Governor who cancels his own decisions and everything comes back to normal, that is to say overspending and carelessness. This novel is witty and very funny due to the various personalities and conflicts it describes and animates for us. The core of this novel is the tragic life of a pig, or hog if you prefer, who is a clandestine passenger on the campus that has cost one quarter million dollars and who dies of a heart attack when he finally gets the opportunity to escape. In other words it is impossible to escape this ghetto, to live outside this ghetto once you have taken roots in it. And the metaphor of the hog is just the best metaphor you can imagine for such a campus, a hog that has been raised only on a fattening diet that makes him so big that he can't even walk. Fatten university campuses with money and they become inoffensive to the outside world because they are self-contained and totally irrelevant for the outside world, or nearly. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Rating:
Summary: When fiction can be as strange as truth
Review: This is a work of fiction, a mischevious send-up of academic life. But anyone who has done significant time at a state university (especially a land-grant college) will also recognize it as an at times penetratingly serious work of cultural anthropology. Through the book's screwball plots and characters, Smiley educates as well as entertains us with the foibles, prejudices, joys, problems, hypocrisies, and resentments that animate university life. This tale is really a series of allegories based on its characters: the self-important senior faculty member who's perpetually busy being busy; the tenured deadwood prof who long ago gave up publishing and now enjoys an abundance of time for cooking, gardening, and entertaining; the provost who must negotiate between "the university's professed goal of excellence in every area" and his own "secret goal of adequacy in most areas"; the activist who champions abstract and far-away causes and neglects his own home life and community; the Babbitts in the state legislature; the students who manage to pop out after four years "intact and undigested, unaffected by critical thinking, the scientific method, empirical inquiry, or reasoned disputation"; and, of course, the omnipotent secretary (who happens to be a lesbian and the only character in the book with a monogamous relationship and harmonious sex life). Smiley's droll satire can be biting and seemingly understated at the same time. My only complaint was that the narrative gets a little bogged down in places. The book may not hold as much charm for those who are uninterested in academic culture. But most readers will come away appreciating Smiley as a top-notch writer.
Rating: 
Summary: A Disappointing Read
Review: Though I have enjoyed Jane Smiley's short stories and novellas, I had trouble finishing this lengthy book. The cast of characters is large, but the characterization lacks depth. As a satire, it does hit the mark at times. I spent several years working for a Midwestern university, and I recognize some of the faculty and administration types she depicts. But...the plot drags and reading becomes an effort. Smiley has a great talent for psychological insight and sophisticated, multi-layered depiction of characters and relationships, but that hardly comes into play in this book. It feels sadly dated as well. The concerns of the late 1980's already seem quaint.
Rating:
Summary: A Terrific Send-Up
Review: Moo is Jane Smiley's terrific send-up of education, bureaucracy, racism, politics, love and just about everything else in the 1980s. Set in a fictional Iowa university town, Moo U. is as much fun as a roller-coaster ride and features a cast of characters that are nothing short of hilarious. There is English professor, Tim Monahan, who is perpetually preoccupied with his always-imminent raise and promotion; provost Ivar Harstad, who is coping with the governor's cuts in university funding; and Bo Jones' secret experiment involving a hog named Earl Butz. Really! And, it only gets better. There is Dr. Lionel Gift who gets hopelessly involved with a Texas billionaire named Arlen Martin. The two cook up a project to mine gold from the world's last virgin rainforest, a project that incurs the wrath Chairman X, a man so caught up in leftist ideology he forgets to marry the mother of his children...for more than twenty years. And best of all, there is Mrs. Walker, the plotting and conniving lesbian secretary to the provost who secretly runs everything at Moo U. with an iron hand. If it seems like Smiley doesn't write much about education in this book about university life, then that's exactly right, for education has little to do with the day-to-day goings-on at Moo U. Moo U. and its cast of off-beat characters are really a microcosm of America under the Reagan Administration and Moo U. could be any university in the United States. The only thing wrong with Moo is that, while it is supposed to be satire, it just misses the mark. Don't get me wrong, this is a hilarious book and a hilarious send-up, but I think true satire requires a harder heart than Smiley seems to have. The ending is a bit of a letdown, especially after the rollicking good ride Smiley has taken us on to get us there. Anyone who doesn't mind a bit of a letdown, however, will find Moo an enjoyable and hilarious book that makes fun of just about everything.
Rating:
Summary: A week four, but still a good book
Review: Jane Smiley know how to spin a good story and she is a good storyteller even sometimes a great one. She is also a entertainer with a sense of humor and can craft good stories. Moo university and its inhabitants is a charming placefor those who have been to a university: For those who should have liked to studied it may give some glimpse of how universities sometimes may be no more than a place for devious intrigues and plots. Smiley has a wicked wit which in my experience describes (some of) the kind of people one finds in these kind of "institutions". Jane has earlier won the Pulitzer price for A thousand Acres, which I also liked. Moo is also a book worth spending time and money on. Though on my harsh scale it gets week 4, which is still very good.
|
