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Product Description
Product Description
Brilliantly funny satire set in a contemporary American university.
Deep in the wheatfields of the American midwest, Moo University is in a state of disarray…
In this witty and biting comedy of manners, Jane Smiley turns her wryly perceptive eye towards a community where men and women, the innocent and the cynical, thinkers and careerists, live and work together – in complete disharmony.
‘Satire on a grand scale, a microscopic examination of contemporary American mores conducted with great wit and gracious indulgence for human frailty …Trying to describe this book's marvellous variety is like trying to describe London to someone who has never been there. The only appropriate exhortation is "Read it."'
About the Author
Jane Smiley was born in LA, grew up in St Louis and studied at Vassar and Iowa. She won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award in 1992 for ‘A Thousand Acres’.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Terrific Send-Up,
This review is from: Moo (Paperback)
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.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Moo U Gets on the Map!,
This review is from: Moo (Paperback)
It's a year of ups and downs for the students and staff of Moo University. Moo is in the Midwest and is known more for its farming studies than its liberal arts - which is no bad thing when most of the students grew up on farms. But it's more than a little frustrating for academic staff members who want to make their careers. Moo is quite a sleepy place until its sleazy economics professor recommends the destruction of virgin rain forests to build a gold mine. Suddenly Moo is on the map! This is great story with compelling characters and lots of individual stories which brilliantly weave into the fabric of one year of academic life.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Multiple strands,
By
This review is from: Moo (Mass Market Paperback)
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.
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