Moo

Literary fiction · Comedy · Satire

First published: 1995
Print length: 609 pagesWheeler Pub., 1995

Description

During the 1989–1990 academic year, the sprawling Midwestern institution known as Moo U becomes a pressure chamber for scholarship, commerce, bureaucracy, and private ambition. Threatened state budget cuts send administrators chasing grants and faculty scrambling to protect their programs. Chairman X, head of horticulture, fights departmental rivals while trying to preserve Old Meats and manage an unconventional family life. Elsewhere, an animal-science professor secretly tests how enormous an eighteen-month-old boar named Earl Butz can become. Four roommates at Dubuque House confront classes, body image, family origins, romance, and sorority aspirations. Moving among more than a dozen interwoven plots, Jane Smiley’s campus satire shows an entire university ecosystem adapting, competing, and compromising when money, status, research, and desire pull it in different directions.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Descriptive · Dialogue-driven · Witty

Pace

Variable

Tone

Humorous · Playful · Satirical · Warm

Structure

Braided

Focus

Character · World

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AmbitionCommunityFamilyPowerWealthWork

About Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley is an American novelist whose fiction ranges from family tragedy and intimate studies of marriage to broad institutional satire. Across these forms, she examines apparently stable social worlds under pressure, tracing how inheritance, ambition, money, desire, and private grievance reshape relationships. She adjusts her narrative method to the scale of the subject: A Thousand Acres uses Ginny’s first-person perspective to recast King Lear on an Iowa farm, while Moo distributes attention across more than a dozen plots to portray a Midwestern university as a network of competing interests. The Age of Grief narrows the focus, allowing marital uncertainty to gather through ordinary domestic routines. Her nonfiction extends this attention to the novel itself. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel considers its history and nature across a span from The Tale of Genji to contemporary American women’s writing.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Wheeler Pub.
Language: English
ISBN: 9781568952420

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Moo