THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 23, 1995 TAG: 9504180546
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY SHARON WEINSTEIN
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
MOO IS the most delightful novel I have read in years. It takes place on the campus of a Midwestern university - nicknamed Moo U in honor of its devotion to agriculture - but its target is every one of us, whether we are, or ever have been, connected to a university.
Only an individual with as vast an intelligence and as profound a compassion for the silliest and most profane of us could have carried Moo off the way Jane Smiley does.
She sees so much. She knows so much. Yet she judges not. This is comedy in its broadest sense: not the superficial jocularity of a Neil Simon play, but the comic vision that affirms life (in spite of everything). Comedy that, as philosopher Suzanne Langer notes, ``connects us to the biological rhythm of life.''
A comedy such as Moo asks us to bounce with the characters who are part of a community, part of the celebratory - sometimes raucous - rituals of modern life.
After all, Moo ends with a wedding. And not a very ordinary one, either.
Chairman X (head of the horticulture department), after living with Lady X for 20 years, decides that it would be a good idea if they really did get married. Everyone, including their children, believed they already were married.
But perhaps I should go back to the beginning.
It all starts with a huge hog named Earl Butz. (Sound familiar? Butz was President Nixon's secretary of agriculture.)
Hogs are normally huge; but in this case, Dr. Bo Jones, experimenting in a secret room of the almost abandoned Old Meats building, has a private mission: to find out ``how big he might grow if allowed to eat at will for all of his natural lifespan.'' A natural symbol of the ultimate consumer.
The answer for Earl is 700 pounds. And there is a wonderful scene near the end of the book in which Earl finally busts out and rampages the campus.
Earl, tended to by work-study student Bob Carlson, is one of the most endearing characters in the book. Smiley creates dozens of characters - students of all backgrounds, deans, a provost, professors, secretaries, people in the community. And she is somehow able to get into their heads and render them in the most exquisitely accurate way.
We don't know exactly how a hog thinks, but once Smiley gets us inside Earl's head, we think: Yep, that's a hog all right.
The plot of the novel hinges around the gold mine that Dr. Lionel Gift, distinguished professor of economics, is proposing in Costa Rica, beneath the largest remaining virgin cloud forest in the world.
Mrs. Loraine Walker, the provost's secretary and the acknowledged power on campus (she regularly siphons funds from athletics to the library), gets wind of what is going on, and once the news leaks out, the university is in big trouble. A 1960s-type riot breaks out. The governor cuts funds and everybody has to realign.
The best part of the novel is that we know Smiley, a professor at Iowa State, is having so much fun with it. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, was loosely based on the King Lear story, and Smiley admits it was ``grim'' carrying out her design for that novel.
But she didn't write Moo as an antidote to A Thousand Acres: ``I knew before A Thousand Acres I wanted to write a tragedy and a comedy,'' she has said.
The range of personality types in this satire is incredible. You will find yourself here. You don't have to be a member of a university to enjoy Moo - just a member of the human race.
- MEMO: Sharon Weinstein is a professor of English at Norfolk State University
and the author of a book of poems, ``Celebrating Absences.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Jane Smiley by CNB