Maybe I had trouble starting this book because I was reading it in littke snatches, and there is such a large cast of characters to sort out. But once into it, the book really moved, and was quite funny, skewering academic pretensions and outside intereference. From the back cover:

"Moo University lies in the heart of the Midwest, a distinguished institution devoted to the art and science of agriculture. Here, in an atmosphere rife with devious plots and lusty liaisons, Chairman X of the Horticulture Department harbors a secret fantasy to kill the dean; Mrs. Walker, the provost's right hand, knows where all the bodies are buried; and Bob Carlson, a sophomore, feeds and maintains his only friend: a hog named Earl Butz. ... Jane Smiley offers us a wickedly funny comedy that is also a darkly poignant slice of life."

Pretty much on target. ( )

When Jane Smiley was interviewed she stated that A Thousand Acres was the tragedy (King Lear) and Moo was the comedy. Both are set in the Midwest and she taught writing to undergraduates at the time. I love this book. It is so funny and her characters are too much! Another funny book about academia is Pnin by Nabokov.

Oh, good book. Nothing much exciting to say about it. Just it was very enjoyable. I liked it much more than I did A Thousand Acres, also by Smiley. That is, admittedly, also a good book, but messy deaths and incest aren't really my cup of tea. The draw of this book, I think, is the series of distinct, somewhat archetypal, characters Smiley sketches out, and how she handles their growing interaction, even/especially when those interactions are not particularly important or are incidental to the main plot.

Now that I've mentioned both of those books, it comes to me that there were hogs featured in both. Hum.

Anyway, Moo is a slightly hyperbolic portrait of a Midwestern state university. Living in a state university town, though not in the Midwest, and being a student myself, I had a good chuckle over a lot of it.

I don't really have much analysis to offer this time around, but I will say that it was rather well written, and I recommend it. Try it if you are looking for mild humor that isn't dumb, and perhaps if you need to let off a little steam from your own university experiences. It seems a bit long at first, but the short chapters break it up well.

And, there's a happy ending.

A desperately funny take on academic life in the Midwest. ( )

All about an agricultural university in the Midwest. Although horticulture, animal husbandry and cop sciences are featured, this story is really focused on people. All the different types who intermingle their lives at the university. Students, professors and groundskeepers. Wives of the professors, workers in the cafeteria and the dean himself. There are secretaries with secret machinations, a farmer with a invention in his barn, a student who eavesdrops on his roommates and works them into his writing assignments, and in the middle of campus, an enormous hog living in an abandoned building- part of someone's experiment . The inside look at academia is full of dry humor and ironic observations. Every few pages or so I burst out laughing. I really could have done without the explicit details in the chapter about who was sleeping with whom. It was still good, though. Intriguing to the end.

Dog Ear Diary ( )