Moo
Authors: Jane Smiley
Acclaim for Jane Smiley’s
Moo
“Entertaining.… Displays a wicked wit and an unerring eye for American foibles.… Stuffed with memorable characters, sparkling with deliciously acid humor,
Moo
is a rare bird in today’s literary menagerie: a great read that also makes you think.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Brilliant … triumphant … much like a magical Shakespearean comedy.”
—Booklist
(starred review)
“A comedy in the truest Chekhovian sense: sad, resonant, and wise.… Juggling dozens of story lines and a multitudinous cast with consummate ease, Ms. Smiley does a deft job of conjuring up Moo U. and chronicling the plights and pleasures of its bumbling denizens.… Comical as the characters in
Moo
can be, they are also depicted as fallible, needy human beings, subject to all the perils of ordinary life.”
—The New York Times
“As jaunty and straightforward as its title,
Moo
allows Smiley to turn literary and stylistic cartwheels.… She masters billionaire talk, bovine-cloning monologues, and the shrewd counsel of black elder sisters.… Is there anything Jane Smiley cannot do?”
—
Time
“Masterful … hilariously wicked.… This is a big, funny novel that keeps you laughing.”
—
Playboy
“Darkly hilarious.… By page five, it will have you laughing so loudly and helplessly that other people in the check-out line will begin to murmur whether the manager ought to be summoned.”
—The Miami Herald
“Smiley has good comic timing.… The story develops through rapid-fire, sound bite—like chapters that give the book the door-slamming mayhem of classic bedroom farce.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Usual and unusual romantic tangles, powerful manipulators, political-personal feuds, and underhanded tenure tracking.… Smiley’s clever storytelling weaves everything together into a well-crafted whole.… All the academic types are here, floating on clouds of soft money and scholastic scheming.”
—
The Baltimore Sun
“Wickedly funny.… One of America’s finest writers.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Memorable.…
Moo
is a cow of a different color. It’s big. It’s funny, in a savvy, satirical, satisfying way.… Readers will be slurping up the last yummy moments of this delicious shake, right down to the bottom of the glass. Please, Ms. Smiley, we want more!”
—The Hartford Courant
“Extremely enjoyable.”
—
Detroit Free Press
“Moo
uses its humor to sweeten the sad truth seeping out between the laughs.… The novels excellence stems from its rich cast and its author’s penetrating insight.… Academia fosters an atmosphere ripe for self-parody. Add to that the neurotic insecurity that compels many academics to take themselves far too seriously. Then set the keen intelligence, slashing wit, and confident voice of Jane Smiley free to romp upon this fertile ground, and you get the best satire of university life since at least
White Noise
, and possibly ever.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Expertly written.… This is a novel of demonstrated expertise.…
Moo
’s a romp.”
—
New York Daily News
JANE SMILEY
Moo
Jane Smiley is the author of twelve novels, as well as four works of nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Smiley lives in northern California.
ALSO BY JANE SMILEY
FICTION
Ten Days in the Hills
Good Faith
Horse Heaven
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
A Thousand Acres
Ordinary Love and Good Will
The Greenlanders
The Age of Grief
Duplicate Keys
At Paradise Gate
Barn Blind
NONFICTION
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
A Year at the Races
Charles Dickens
Catskill Crafts
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2009
Copyright © 1995 by Jane Smiley
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Smiley, Jane.
Moo : a novel / by Jane Smiley. —1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3569.M39M66 1995
813′.54—dc20 94-12840
eISBN: 978-0-307-80529-4
v3.1
For Phoebe, Lucy, and Axel James, with love
Part One
Old Meats
F
ROM THE OUTSIDE
it was clear that the building known generally as “Old Meats” had eased under the hegemony of the horticulture department. Its southern approach, once a featureless slope of green lawn, was now an undulating perennial border whose two arms embraced a small formal garden defined by a carefully clipped and fragrant boxwood hedge. In front of that, an expanse of annuals flowed down the hillside and spilled across flat ground in a tide of August reds, golds, and yellows. Here and there, discreetly placed experimentals tested the climate. Right up against the long windowless southern wall of Old Meats, someone, sometime, without benefit of application, grant, permission from administration or grounds crew, without even the passing back and forth of a memo, someone had planted, then espaliered, a row of apricot and peach trees. In midsummer, just at the end of summer session, they were seen to bear fruit—heavy burnished apricots and big peaches swollen with juice that later disappeared and never seemed to reappear on the salad bars or the dessert bars in any of the dorms or fraternity houses. Nor were they sold at any hort department fund-raising sale, the way apples, Christmas trees, and bedding plants were. They just appeared and disappeared, unnoticed by most though legendary to the few who had stolen fruit, who kept an eye on the seed catalogues, wondering when these cultivars, the Moo U. cultivars, might be introduced to the open market.
In fact, though it stood much in the way of foot traffic from the Bovine Confinement Complex, the Business College, the Chemistry building, the foreign travel office, and graduate student housing, and though, as generations of freshman geographers had found, it stood on the exact geographical center of the campus (unless you included the recently constructed Vet School two miles to the south, which threw everything off), and though it was large and blocky, Old Meats had disappeared from the perceptions of the university population at large. This was fine with the horticulture department, for certain unnamed members and their student cadres had just this summer laid
out an extension of the perennial border to the east, curving in wanton floral revelry toward Old Meats’ unused loading dock and Ames Road. So much, said the Chairman in private meetings with the rest of his faculty, for their
assigned
garden site, out by the physical plant and the bus barn, on a dead-end road that no one travelled unless lost. Guerrilla action, as he often remarked to the woman everyone including their children thought was his wife and whom he had met in SDS at the Chicago convention in 1969, was as protean and changeable as the needs of the people.