Moo

I would say not the best of Jane Smiley's books. It's idea is based on the fall and fall of the administration of Moo University. It parodies characters with huge flaws and failings to try to tell us the story of all big organisations when the money runs out. I feel it is too broad in its story lines and tries to be all encompassing. It made me not actually care about any of the characters. I found I could not distinguish between any of them in the end trying to remember who and what they were when their name came up . . . . . . . . . oh except Earl !!!!

I found this book too long. My copy has small print but even so it's over 400 pages. I much prefer David Lodge's campus novels which I would highly recommend.

Set in Moo University, this campus novel parodies the usual range of acadedmic and student characters with huge flaws and failings, all surrounded by institutional failings. So far, so campus novel, and there are scores in the canon, such as Lucky Jim and its modern equivalent Somewhere in Europe, both of which feature the little man surviving in a mad bonkers university.It is perhaps too broad and tries to be all encompassing. The characters are very much types and many sort of merge into one. This may well appeal more to American readers too.It is funny sometimes. but a lot of pages to wade through here - way too long. If it'd been snappier it would have been better.3.5 stars

As a University employee, I found this hilarious. It may seem like a comedy, but to me it was more like nonfiction :) Amazingly vivid and engaging writing, as usual.

Moo is one of the very best campus novels. The story is set in an American university in the mid-west at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s during a period when the institution is facing a fiscal crisis and there is widespread anxiety among the faculty. It is a trenchant academic satire and also a satire of many of the cultural trends and stereotypes of the times. My only discomfort with this work is that there are such a large number of characters that none are really fully developed.Quite entertaining and well-worth reading.

This was such a pleasurable read - highly intelligent, witty, clever, funny and poignant. Smiley here takes on American academia. Reminiscent for me of Richard Russo's novel Straight Man, though I don't know which novel came first, in that it also describes the terrible jockeying for tenure and the seething disquiet and discontent that seems to lie beneath the American academic life-style. This was equally, if not more, entertaining. There is a richness in Smiley's characterisations that can differentiate at a stroke what life feels like for four different girls sharing a college room - and there is a wide variety of characters - secretaries, serving ladies, new tutors, tenured professors, administrative staff - all given sharp and clear delineation with effortless craft in the writing. The plot is beautifully worked through, with multiple strands - again Smiley makes it seem effortless.This was Jane Smiley's first book but one would never know it; she has supreme artistry and powers of invention. Moo is a sheer pleasure from start to finish.

this is luscivious and sensationalistic, in its own intelectual wayI don't fall for thatI put an X on the Moo

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.