Jun

2

Book ‘Em: The Pig Says…

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

June 2, 2008 |

moo1.jpgAnyone who assumes places of learning are quiet, pristine places where emotions take a back seat to deep thinking has never been inside one. Academics are just as human as the next guy, and Jane Smiley’s Moo, which follows various academics, including an economics professor who thinks money is the root of all good, a horticulture department chair who refuses to give his name and believes money is the root of all evil, an agriculture professor obsessed with hogs, an English professor who finds tenure surprisingly hard to get and his third book surprisingly easy to publish, and various administrators trying to cope with budget cuts imposed by a blunt-speaking governor. Set in an unnamed state in the Midwest, mostly on the campus of Moo University, the novel also follows a small number of students, including four young women from very different backgrounds thrown together in a dorm and a student who lives through his short stories. Straddling 1989 and 1990, the novel doesn’t deal with the culture wars directly, but hints at how academic debates and issues are shaped as much by personalities as they are by ideologies. Moo plays an ensemble cast together harmoniously, but doesn’t draw easy conclusions. And it reveals that people really do sometimes have sex in the library. If you’ve ever worked on a college campus, that’s probably something you’ve heard but never believed.

More importantly, though, Smiley, who won a Pulitzer in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres, spins all her characters in a merry-go-round of small and large events. At one point the provost has a quiet revelation that the university is “a vast network of interlocking wishes”. It’s a beautiful vision of what an educational institution can be, and it goes even further:

Its limits expanding at the speed of light, the university could teach a kid, male or female, to do anything from reading a poem to turning protein molecules into digital memory, from brewing beer to reinterpreting his or her entire past.

The tragedy is that the university is not an enclosed system, and it’s threatened by internal and external forces. Like most institutions its grand ambitions, the interlocking wishes, and its ability to meet the direst needs are undermined by human frailty. And sometimes, too, miracles happen.


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