An Academic Romp

...Helen Levy, professor of foreign languages (French and Italian), set down her thermos of black coffee and nudged her briefcase under the table with her foot...

...Smiley, who teaches at Iowa State University, knows her farm life, as she showed convincingly in A Thousand Acres...

...Deasey about the Jews in Ireland, other races were never let in...

...An array of students run the gamut from puzzled to overexperienced, and a battery of administrators must all bow to the provost's formidably efficient secretary...

...Indeed, half the amusement in this book derives from the relative success and failure rates of these enterprises...

...Translated here to a comic scale, the technique gives us that rarity among humorous novels, an extended romp...

...Flesh " SOME 40 YEARS ago Kingsley Amis delighted readers with Lucky Jim...

...The pillar of rectitude who is the chair of the horticulture department has never married the mother of his children, the former livestock building known as Old Meats houses a growing secret—and actions in one part of the university can bring dangerously unanticipated reactions in another...

...Lionel Gift, a well-funded economics professor, is so in love with the twin principles of consumption and production that he calls his students customers...

...The world she is simply, though rather intricately, rendering is complex...

...Granted, making an ordinary classroom scene interesting is a tough job, yet this is precisely what a good teacher does...

...In scenes both savage and comic, he satirized the new red-brick university's pretensions and hypocrisy: the arrogance of the established professoriat, the blithe indifference of demanding students, the predicament of hapless underling instructors caught in a web of class warfare...

...Too often, in the interest of serving up drama, it depicts a faculty at war and an entirely bemused student body, along with sexual and political corruption that would put the Italian Renaissance to shame...

...That is not an unworthy motive, and Smiley's rendition fully satisfies the urge...

...Dubuque House, a subsidized dormitory, exists to foster multicultural friendships among women students...

...Lionel Gift, distinguished professor of economics, was as everyone including Dr...

...Ironically, only the embarrassment of class seems immune to corrective political action...

...This suggests another reason for the recent attraction of the university novel: In an era when fewer people seem to be reading literature, the exceptions are perforce intellectuals who occasionally want to read something other than the latest escapade of the rich and stupid...

...Smiley's Moo U, like countless other campuses, has altered much of this...

...Only authorial omniscience exposes the multifarious patterns of existence at the core of this universe...

...It was 1953, and angular men in glasses, crew-cuts and bow ties were everywhere, a benign army of uncles, who liked to point things out with the stem of their pipes...

...But it is a smart comedy that rewards the intellect even as it pokes fun at academic pretension...

...In fact her hog, Earl Butz, resembles nothing so much as Wodehouse's prize pig, the Empress of Blandings...

...writer in residence Timothy Monahan is a man on the make, in both art and life...

...Amis' lead was followed by others, including Malcolm Bradbury (Eating People Is Wrong) and David Lodge (Changing Places...

...My single stylistic complaint is that Smiley starts too many sections with the dossier method of portrayal, supplying relevant background and particulars before the characters are propelled on their way...

...From the outside," begins the novel, "it was clear"—but the university, that naughty child of the Enlightenment, has rendered itself more and more opaque to outsiders over the years...

...Harstad's vision is of a kindlier, more cohesive community, but its disappearance should not inspire false nostalgia...

...Timothy Monahan, associate Professorof English and teacher of fiction writing, had never returned to the campus more than 12 hours before the beginning of his first class...

...One of the book's themes concerns the damage present-day "experts" can do when pontificating on matters beyond their ken: An errant memo leads to the threatened despoilment of an entire Costa Rican cloud forest...

...Ivar couldn't help but pause and wonder...

...That Moo U houses an agricultural college itself emphasizes the split between students like the white farm boy Bob Carlson, who is able to curry favor with livestock, and the black, street-wise Mary Jackson from Chicago...

...That the genre remains appealing is apparent from the recent works of younger practitioners like Michael Ma-lone (Foolscap), James Kaplan (Pearl s Progress), Cathleen Schine (Rameau s Niece), and Edward Allen (Mustang Sally...

...The self-taught farmer Stroop is treated condescendingly...

...Even when they pursue these activities, they do so with the self-loathing that makes a lay audience feel superior: Here are smart people, the novel says, and look at what a mess they've made of things...

...Amis' Jim Dixon had difficulties with his working-class background, yet his woman-troubles were seen through a comradely, misogynistic lens...

...Any doubt about that is removed by the reminiscences of Moo U Provost Ivar Harstad: "What is a University...

...In an era when academia has taken to sedulously scrutinizing the culture, perhaps it is only fitting that the culture repay the favor...

...Black students and faculty are academically courted through affirmative action, though racism still rears its head in the cafeteria...

...Together with ingeniously interwoven plot lines, Smiley's slightly cartoonish creations bring to mind P. G. Wodehouse...

...There were no race problems because, to paraphrase Joyce's Mr...

...But then snob-bism of one kind or another has always existed at universities, where people acquire knowledge as a means of upward mobility and try to shed their background as soon as possible...

...Now Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley has cast her eye on the campus in Moo...

...The truth is, despite the growing malaise in acade-mia, many professors enjoy teaching and many students benefit from their efforts...

...So does O. T. Early, the state's budget-slashing Governor...

...Granted, Smiley has bigger game afoot than academic minutiae...

...Dr...

...When he'd first come to this particular university, at 18, he had easily found what he was looking for...

...It isn't giving away too much to note that Moo ends in multiple marriages, a further justification for calling it a comedy...

...Rarely does anyone actually teach a class, carry out research, or crack a book...

...A fanner named Lor-ten Stroop and his mysterious invention get pulled into the plot...

...The same applies to faculty, who are just as eager to get ahead—on their own merits or someone else's...

...Another motif is how militantly anti-intellectual government has become...

...But Smiley's university is also a universe of sorts, so that her burlesque fulfills another equally important function: It holds a mirror up to us all...

...An ex-cathedra chapter titled "The Common Wisdom" tells us: "It was well known among the legislators that the faculty as a whole was determined to undermine the moral and commercial well-being of the state, and that supporting a large and nationally famous university with state monies was exactly analogous to raising a nest of vipers in your own bed...

...While Moo's liveliness makes it a pleasure to read, the book again raises the question of what an academic novel should contain...

...Yes, today's campus is a different place from the traditional ivory tower...

...Indeed, little at Moo U is what it seems to be...

...One of Smiley's chapters is titled, "Who's in Bed with Whom...

...Smiley's long suit is the group psychological portrait, as in Barn Blindor The Greenlanders, but conveyed through articulate statement rather than nuance...

...a student named Keri tries desperately to hide her past as the Warren County Pork Queen...

...And a man named Arlen Martin, a jug-eared billionaire from Dallas who looks and acts like Ross Perot...

...She is most adept at orchestrating confrontations: Her best-known work, A Thousand Acres, borrows the dramatis personae of King Lear...

...Bo Jones, whose specialty is the study of hogs, gives new meaning to the term "pork barrel...

...It's a quick, efficient device, and in Smiley's expert prose it allows for a lot of humorous asides, yet it does at times seem a bit forced...

...Gift himself agreed, a deeply principled man...

...The characters in Moo could make up a commedia dell'arte company—or a Midwestern university...