Smiley, Jane - Laurie Taylor (review date 9 June 1995)

Laurie Taylor (review date 9 June 1995)

SOURCE: “Pork-Barrel Politics,” in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 8, No. 356, June 9, 1995, p. 37.

[In the following review, Taylor lauds Smiley's use of humor in her presentation of university life in Moo.]

We can't see Jane Smiley's hands in the photograph of her on the back flap of Moo this very funny successor to her Pulitzer prize-winning tragedy A Thousand Acres, but it's difficult to imagine that they're doing anything other than pulling strings. Even as she introduces the lengthy list of characters who inhabit the sprawling Midwestern agricultural college called Moo University, we can sense the twitches of personality, the tugs of ideology, which will propel each of them into a distinctive moral or symbolic role in the comedy.

Earl Butz may, when he is introduced in the first chapter, be only a hog undergoing a fattening-up regime in accordance with an...

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