Often enough, I don’t even care what I think. So, I’m certainly cautious in inconveniencing electrons to share my opinions on a book about which I didn’t think too highly. But having enthusiastically recommended several campus novels (both here and here), and having kindly received a recommendation for Moo by Jane Smiley (thank you!), I’ll ‘finish the job.’ (Which job is of course never really finished, especially if I receive more recommendations, so… keep ’em coming!)
Moo has a lot of characters, and so expect quite a lot of ‘set up.’ And, often enough, the names are hardly memorable—Keri, Sherri, and Mary (all tied to a single dorm room)… or, more generally, Lydia, Lyle, Jack, Joy, Joe, etcetera. Yes, many—but not all—get last names. And yes, I’m sure this is all quite intentional. But one doesn’t have to like it, and, for me, it was a distraction. Despite an admirable attempt at inclusivity (race, religion, sex, etcetera), so many characters seemed very oddly the same on account of too little character development.
Moo is also a novel about students as much as one about professors, and while this could be a draw, it didn’t play that way for me. I do enjoy, say, The Secret History, and the ground that novel broke… but I find those (perhaps less believable) characters quite a lot more interesting than those attending Moo U. Moo is also weirdly agrarian, which didn’t ‘speak to me’ despite my undergraduate years at the University of California Davis. To be fair, I was a EE there, and while I knew all about the ‘porthole cow,’ I never visited. So, sure… that’s on me. But it might be the relatively unique student who not only attended an ‘ag school,’ but for whom it meaningfully impacted their attendance. (I do remember being in exile during the construction of an engineering building, and having my math prof complain about the hog smell every morning… and he was a good prof. Still, this didn’t meaningfully connect me to Moo U’s hog, Earl.) Finally, even as I lived through the era, the geopolitical and sociological context of Moo felt somehow too dated.
So, I’m at ‘meh.’ The book is surely quite the romp for some, and perhaps it will be for you. But it was too much undergraduate-student-looking-for-life and revenge-of-the-secretaries for me. Still, the story certainly develops as one sticks with it, and there is no doubt certain portions are quite funny… even as I expect readers will disagree as to which ones those are.
Ultimately, for this reader, Moo just never quite gets to where it is going. I’ll stick with Straight Man.
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