Moo

Jane Smiley's new novel -- the first since her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, A Thousand Acres -- is her most ambitious (and delicious) yet: a rich, blackly comic, brilliantly on-target send-up of our society.

As a microcosm of today's Western world, Jane Smiley gives us a Midwestern university nicknamed (in honor of its devotion to agriculture) Moo U. In the wake of the profligate eighties, Moo U. is desperate for money and rife with intrigues and machinations -private, public, sexual, intellectual, financial, technological, domestic, global, social, and political. Smiley's tone is so cool that laughter comes without warning as she lightly balances a cosmic cast (everybody in bed with somebody in the romantic or French-farcical or Washington, D.C. sense) that includes top-salaried Dr. Lionel Gift, poet laureate of consumerism, who refers to the students as customers... Chairman X of the horticultural department, who is so pure and classical a leftist that it hasn't occurred to him to marry his wife of twenty years...the power behind all thrones: the dean's middle-aged secretary, Mrs. Walker, who knows more than J. Edgar Hoover ever knew about one and all...the small, folksy, jug-eared Texas billionaire who's tempting hungry Moo U. with funds for his own mysterious agenda. And, at the secret heart of the campus, an unauthorized experimental project involving an (increasingly) large and touching creature who is a living symbol of unleashed desire and consumption.