Moo by Jane Smiley

First published: 1995

Type of plot: Social satire

Time of work: 1989-1990

Locale: A Midwestern university

Principal Characters:

• Ivar Harstad, a provost at Moo U
• Loraine Walker, his secretary
• Nils Harstad, Ivar’s twin brother, the dean of agricultural extension
• Arlen Martin, a corporate financier
• Chairman X, the head of the horticulture department
• Bo Jones, a researcher interested in who hogs are, rather than what people do to hogs
• Earl Butz, a Landrace boar, the subject of Jones’s experiment
• Bob Carlson, Jones’s work-study research assistant
• Loren Stroop, a paranoid farmer who has invented a machine he believes will revolutionize farming
• Gary Olson, a student who fantasizes about fellow students for his fiction writing assignments

The Novel

Moo explores the life of a Midwestern university, affectionately called “Moo U” because of its agricultural orientation. The university is under pressure to change with the times—it faces budget cuts, new courses are crowding out the traditional fields, and both faculty and staff are diversifying. Author Jane Smiley takes a scattered approach to her topic. Rather than focus on a single plot line or primary set of characters, she intertwines many stories of the university’s life, mixing perspectives of faculty, students, administrators, and staff.

The primary pressure on Moo U is financial. Facing budget cuts of several million dollars, the administration cuts programs and steps up fund-raising efforts, including grant-seeking by the administration and individual faculty members. Monetary pressures force an alliance with TransNationalAmerica Corporation, run by Arlen Martin, a corporate financier who engages in various questionable practices. Martin insinuates himself, through various corporate entities, into numerous projects at Moo U. He funds research into false pregnancy in cows that would stimulate milk production, combined with cloning to produce herds of the best milk producers; a museum of the history of chicken production that would save Morgantown Hall, a former abattoir affectionately known as “Old Meats”; and a study of the effects of gold mining under a virgin cloud forest in Costa Rica. When the backlash from the last of those projects hits, TransNational faces pressures of its own and withdraws all funding, putting the university at even greater risk.

Various story lines show how people at Moo U react to changes. Chairman X, head of the horticulture department and an avowed communist, fears loss of his prized gardens. He becomes incensed when he hears of the plan to mine gold in Costa Rica and mounts a protest, complete with mimeographed leaflets and a demonstration, at which he physically assaults Nils Harstad, the twin brother of Provost Ivar Harstad and the dean of agricultural extension. He blames agricultural outreach to less developed countries for destroying their way of life, and he takes personally the battle between agriculture and horticulture, training his students as revolutionaries. He falls in love, or at least lust, with Cecelia Sanchez, a beautiful language instructor from Los Angeles with a tenuous family tie to Costa Rica that she exaggerates for his benefit.

Other characters are less overt in their protests. Bo Jones hides a hog named Earl Butz in the otherwise unused Old Meats building, intending to study the “natural” life of a hog by letting Earl eat to his heart’s content and live out his life, rather than being slaughtered. Jones surreptitiously spends nearly a quarter of a million dollars on his experiment. When it appears that his research may be discovered, he leaves for Asia in an effort to find wild hogs that he can study in their natural habitat. Another example is Loraine Walker, secretary to provost Ivar Harstad. She moves money from the athletic budget to her favored departments and programs, as well as filtering the information that reaches the provost and making deals all across the campus. She arranges to leak the report about the Costa Rican mining project.

Smiley also treats personal relationships. A selected few students show the attitudes and goals that students bring to the university and how those change. Diane, whose goal is to join a sorority to make connections and refine her social skills, pairs up with Bob Carlson, a shy, unrefined farm boy who interrupts dates with her to tend to Earl, the hog. Mary, a black student from Chicago, experiences discrimination but decides to stay, adapting to her white roommates. Gary Olson fixates on Lydia, the girlfriend of his roommate Lyle, using her as the subject of his assignments for a class in fiction and ruminating about the future she faces without him in her life.

Faculty and staff members also form new partnerships and change old ones. Cecelia Sanchez first dates Timothy Monahan, a womanizing fiction instructor, then Chairman X, who reignites her passion. Nils Harstad decides to marry Marly Hellmich, a worker in the commons and member of his church. His brother, Ivar, and Ivar’s longtime companion Helen Levy, from the foreign languages department, similarly decide to wed. After confessing his infidelity, Chairman X weds the mother of his four children, with whom he has lived for twenty years; they simply had never gotten around to marriage and as communists considered marriage an undesired form of property ownership. The various relationships illustrate the vast differences in the various people who populate a university.

The Characters

Smiley uses a wide variety of characters to exemplify university life, spreading her focus among faculty, administrators, students, and staff members. This approach allows her to show the diversity of university life, but it also results in her characters being less than fully realized. She gives each a few traits or attitudes rather than an entire personality. Rather than develop and evolve, they simply change; the illustration more resembles a series of snapshots than a motion picture.

The administration of Moo U guides the action of the novel. Provost Ivar Harstad seems to be at the helm, but his secretary, Loraine Walker, actually steers the ship. The interaction of these two shows Smiley’s conception of university leadership, with the real power held and used by those involved in day-to-day operations. Harstad’s directions for fund-raising and grant-seeking shape faculty members’ actions, and Walker’s dealings allow avenues for action outside official channels.

Faculty members receive most of the attention in the omniscient narration. Smiley deftly mixes and contrasts various types. Ardent communist and Buddhist Chairman X is matched against traditional Nils Harstad. Latina Cecelia Sanchez, from Los Angeles, faces culture shock in the Midwest, disturbed by the cold, the quiet, and the smiles that never lead to anything. She moves in her relationships from the good-looking but self-serving writer Timothy Monahan to Chairman X, who puts her back in touch with her roots. Dean Jellinek at first is enthralled with the possibility of using cloning and false pregnancy to change dairy production, but once his research is funded, he loses interest and despairs. His lover, Joy Pfisterer, works in equine management. She feels a true love for her animals as individuals, rather than seeing them as objects of research, and she is appalled by the prospect of herds of identical cows. Nils Harstad decides that he wants to be married and have six children, then chooses a member of his church, Marly Hellmich, as his wife. She accepts his offer after exploring his financial status, seeing the opportunity to move up in the world from working in the commons, but she leaves him before the wedding.

The students at Moo U have their unique quirks, but each represents a type. Bob Carlson is a traditional student, earnest, interested in agriculture, and focused on his work, particularly with Earl the hog. He dates Diane, one of the new breed, who sees university life as a means of refining her social skills rather than of acquiring knowledge and facts. Sherri is out to separate herself from her high school acquaintances and remake herself. She has lost sixty-two pounds in the last year and dyes her hair red. She has a photographic memory but finds herself failing because she does not attend classes.

One of the more interesting characters is an outsider to the university. Loren Stroop invents a machine that he believes will revolutionize agriculture, keeping it hidden because he fears that the government or big agricultural business interests will kill him to prevent it from being disseminated. Smiley leads readers to believe that Stroop is no more than a crackpot. In his will, however, he leaves the machine to the university, and the opportunity to patent it offers financial salvation.

Critical Context

Smiley brings her Midwestern background to many of her works. She never lived on a working farm, but she was reared in St. Louis, Missouri, and absorbed the rural atmosphere. She also taught at Iowa State University at Ames, which she says she used as a model for Moo U only in that both are large land-grant universities.

Moo is a companion piece to her A Thousand Acres (1991), winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics’ Circle Award. A Thousand Acres is based on William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605-1606) and is a tragedy involving incest, madness, and rivalry in a Midwestern family. Smiley conceived Moo, her next book, as a counterpart, presenting the comedic side of Midwestern life.

Moo represents a departure for Smiley, not only because of its lighter tone but also because of its different and broader focus. Earlier works tended to focus on single families or small groups undergoing a single crisis, whereas Moo presents a series of crises faced by a wide cast of characters. Although the setting is Midwestern, the focus is less on traditional Midwestern life than on new elements entering that life. She retains her concern with emotional life and the effects of neglecting emotional needs, but these effects are presented humorously rather than tragically. She also expands her scope to social and institutional life, rather than concentrating on the family.

Bibliography

Bush, Tracy. “Moo.” The Christian Century, May 24, 1995, 567-570. Compares Moo to works by A. Manette Ansay and Jane Hamilton.

Moore, Lorrie. “Moo.” Yale Review, 83, no. 14 (October 1995): 135-143. An extended review of the novel.

“A Novel Encounter.” Harper’s Bazaar, March 1995, 168-169. Smiley and Philip Weiss discuss Moo and his Cock-a-doodle-doo, finding similarities in the two novels.

Pearlman, Mickey. “Jane Smiley.” In Listen to Their Voices. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. An interview in which Smiley comments on her Midwestern background and the effects of her personal experiences on her writing.

“Smiley, Jane.” In World Authors: 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby. New York: H. W. Wilson. A biography and brief synopsis of Smiley’s works up to and including Moo.

Tokahama, Valerie. “A Chat with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Jane Smiley.” Orange County Register, April 24, 1996. Discusses Moo as a follow-up to A Thousand Acres. Includes questions and answers from an address at the Newport Beach Public Library and selections from an interview with Smiley.