Moo

In urgent need of funds, Moo University, a huge midwestern agricultural college, and its male-dominated hierarchy search for a solution to their economic woes, in a hilarious new novel from the author of A Thousand Acres. Simultaneous.

s new novel -- the first since her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, A Thousand Acres -- is her most ambitious (and delicious) yet: a rich, blackly comic, brilliantly on-target send-up of our society.

As a microcosm of today's Western world, Jane Smiley gives us a Midwestern university nicknamed (in honor of its devotion to agriculture) Moo U. In the wake of the profligate eighties, Moo U. is desperate for money and rife with intrigues and machinations -private, public, sexual, intellectual, financial, technological, domestic, global, social, and political. Smiley's tone is so cool that laughter comes without warning as she lightly balances a cosmic cast (everybody in bed with somebody in the romantic or French-farcical or Washington, D.C. sense) that includes top-salaried Dr. Lionel Gift, poet laureate of consumerism, who refers to the students as customers... Chairman X of the horticultural department, who is so pure and classical a leftist that it hasn't occurred to him to marry his w