Very flat, Iowa
Michael Carlson
MOO by Jane Smiley Flamingo, £15.99, pp. 414 The hermetically sealed world of the university campus is a disproportionately rich source for novelists. The darker side of academe's supposedly rarefied atmosphere has lent itself to works that range from Barth's Giles Goat Boy to Porterhouse Blue.
Unfortunately, in Moo, Jane Smiley is more blunt than Sharpe. She avoids milk- ing this rich source for anything more than a genteel smile and an obvious point. One senses that Smiley, who teaches at Iowa State University, must be woefully unhappy but fantastically comfortable in her own Midwestern situation, for there is much griping but little feeling in this book.
With so many writers in America employed as teachers, the campus novel provides a means for them to vent their frustration at being subservient to bureau- crats and responsible for the education of the well-scrubbed. They take their prolix revenge in novels like Moo, and rack up publication credits towards tenure at the same time.
If you have read Jane Smiley's Green- landers, you may simply recognise a dab hand with a flat and boring landscape. Making a point about the homogeneity of a Midwestern campus is fine, but Smiley's characters are as hard to differentiate as `It was very romantic— they met while de-oiling contaminated gulls.' those in the Viking sagas. The students might as well have names like Kelli Sherris- dottir; they are that difficult to tell apart. In fact the faculty boasts the identical twins Ivar and Nils Halstead, who presumably escaped from Greenland just before the Slcraelings got them.
Everyone in the book, including the author, speaks in the same flat voice. I exaggerate. The black females inject 'girl' into their conversations with each other (`Girl, you're crazy') and the students dis- tinguish themselves from the faculty by, like, using 'like' in awkward places.
The outline for Moo may have been a winner. Much of it is familiar (there is even a role for Anthony Sher in the TV adapta- tion). Unfortunately, as the plot is enacted it is telegraphed so blatantly and described so clinically as to render it inert. It is like being told the story of Custer's Last Stand by an animal rights activist concerned about the humane disposal of the horses that died.
This outline has been stuffed to bursting, like Earl Butz, a hog being force-fed in a secret experiment on campus. The 700- pound porker is the novel's most endear- ing, if not necessarily most complex character.
The other characters follow campus novel conventions. The dean's secretary actually runs the university. She is also a cold lesbian. Her boss is a cold hetero- barely-sexual. The cast also includes an ex- radical professor (Chairman X, a nice conceit), the grant-obsessed corporate pro- fessor, the hapless would-be bureaucrats, and the writing professor with the Peter Pan complex, working the MLA circuit and looking for a publisher.
Most of the insight to these characters, unfortunately, is attempted in a few paragraphs of authorial backchat, which reaches it nadir toward the end when one character digresses into three pages about the changes in American colleges since the 1950s. Or else it is described through food. Like the so-called dirty realists, Smiley looks on with horror as Americans munch their way through Brand-Name foodstuffs. A Chicana professor is recognisable because she likes spicy food. Everyone else finds things 'tasty', apart from Earl Butz, for whom eating is just a job.
One of Moo's blurbs is an anonymous quote, which one hopes is not author- generated. 'There is nothing Jane Smiley cannot write about fabulously well,' it says. Read that again. Add your own 'sic'. Writ- ing well can be defined in many ways, of course, but when Ms Smiley tells us that one character's 'first love was still cloning' we assume she doesn't mean that he left an abandoned lover out there somewhere reproducing herself genetically ad infini- tum. I'm afraid the book is full of such longueurs. And as a campus story Moo has not enough Animal House and rather too much Little College On The Prairie. In fact Moo is an almost udder bore.
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