by Smiley, Jane
Acclaim for Jane Smiley’s Moo
“Entertaining.… Displays a wicked wit and an unerring eye for American foibles.… Stuffed with memorable characters, sparkling with deliciously acid humor, Moo is a rare bird in today’s literary menagerie: a great read that also makes you think.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Brilliant … triumphant … much like a magical Shakespearean comedy.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“A comedy in the truest Chekhovian sense: sad, resonant, and wise.… Juggling dozens of story lines and a multitudinous cast with consummate ease, Ms. Smiley does a deft job of conjuring up Moo U. and chronicling the plights and pleasures of its bumbling denizens.… Comical as the characters in Moo can be, they are also depicted as fallible, needy human beings, subject to all the perils of ordinary life.”
—The New York Times
“As jaunty and straightforward as its title, Moo allows Smiley to turn literary and stylistic cartwheels.… She masters billionaire talk, bovine-cloning monologues, and the shrewd counsel of black elder sisters.… Is there anything Jane Smiley cannot do?”
—Time
“Masterful … hilariously wicked.… This is a big, funny novel that keeps you laughing.”
—Playboy
“Darkly hilarious.… By page five, it will have you laughing so loudly and helplessly that other people in the check-out line will begin to murmur whether the manager ought to be summoned.”
—The Miami Herald
“Smiley has good comic timing.… The story develops through rapid-fire, sound bite—like chapters that give the book the door-slamming mayhem of classic bedroom farce.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Usual and unusual romantic tangles, powerful manipulators, political-personal feuds, and underhanded tenure tracking.… Smiley’s clever storytelling weaves everything together into a well-crafted whole.… All the academic types are here, floating on clouds of soft money and scholastic scheming.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“Wickedly funny.… One of America’s finest writers.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Memorable.… Moo is a cow of a different color. It’s big. It’s funny, in a savvy, satirical, satisfying way.… Readers will be slurping up the last yummy moments of this delicious shake, right down to the bottom of the glass. Please, Ms. Smiley, we want more!”
—The Hartford Courant
“Extremely enjoyable.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Moo uses its humor to sweeten the sad truth seeping out between the laughs.… The novels excellence stems from its rich cast and its author’s penetrating insight.… Academia fosters an atmosphere ripe for self-parody. Add to that the neurotic insecurity that compels many academics to take themselves far too seriously. Then set the keen intelligence, slashing wit, and confident voice of Jane Smiley free to romp upon this fertile ground, and you get the best satire of university life since at least White Noise, and possibly ever.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Expertly written.… This is a novel of demonstrated expertise.… Moo’s a romp.”
—New York Daily News
JANE SMILEY
Moo
Jane Smiley is the author of twelve novels, as well as four works of nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Smiley lives in northern California.
ALSO BY JANE SMILEY
FICTION
Ten Days in the Hills
Good Faith
Horse Heaven
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
A Thousand Acres
Ordinary Love and Good Will
The Greenlanders
The Age of Grief
Duplicate Keys
At Paradise Gate
Barn Blind
NONFICTION
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
A Year at the Races
Charles Dickens
Catskill Crafts
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2009
Copyright © 1995 by Jane Smiley
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Smiley, Jane.
Moo : a novel / by Jane Smiley. —1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3569.M39M66 1995
813′.54—dc20 94-12840
eISBN: 978-0-307-80529-4
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
For Phoebe, Lucy, and Axel James, with love
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
1 Old Meats
2 More Than Seven Thousand New Customers Every August
3 The Midwest
4 The Common Wisdom
5 Secular Humanism
6 Creative Writing
7 Homo Economicus
8 The First Memo
9 A Party
10 Same Night, Different Party
11 Born Again
12 A Rule Broken
13 The Keynote
14 The Provost Is Tempted
15 A Proposal Made
16 Earl Ponders
17 A Vision of the Future
18 A Soldier of the Revolution
19 The Worst Horse in the World
20 Who’s in Bed with Whom
21 It’s Ironic
Part Two
22 Trickle-Down Economics
23 The Dusty Archives
24 Picking and Choosing
25 A Revision of the Future
26 Clutter
27 Call for Papers
28 Networking
29 Midterm Review
30 A Celebration
31 He Tells Her He’s Not Married
32 It’s Always Something
33 Why?
Part Three
34 Why Not?
35 The Consequences
36 Another Point of View
37 Earl’s Opinion
38 An Unbelievable Coincidence
39 Off Campus
40 Dissemination
41 Harvest Home
42 Leben und Arbeit
43 Up or Out
44 Some Research
45 Privileged Information
46 So Soon
47 Joe Doaks, Young American
48 “Lydia”
Part Four
49 Feliz Navidad
50 Away in a Manger
51 Merry Christmas
52 Happy Holidays
53 Season’s Greetings
54 Happy New Year
55 Death and the Maiden
56 Less Talk, More Action
57 Mass Media
58 You Can’t Always Get What You Want
59 Conspiracy Theory
60 Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Part Five
61 Downsizing
62 Stormy Weather
63 Golden Arches
64 A Little Deconstruction
65 T
he Ripple Effect
66 The Provost Reflects
67 Deus ex Machina
68 Paperwork
69 Off-off-off Campus
70 Some Weddings
Part One
1
Old Meats
FROM THE OUTSIDE it was clear that the building known generally as “Old Meats” had eased under the hegemony of the horticulture department. Its southern approach, once a featureless slope of green lawn, was now an undulating perennial border whose two arms embraced a small formal garden defined by a carefully clipped and fragrant boxwood hedge. In front of that, an expanse of annuals flowed down the hillside and spilled across flat ground in a tide of August reds, golds, and yellows. Here and there, discreetly placed experimentals tested the climate. Right up against the long windowless southern wall of Old Meats, someone, sometime, without benefit of application, grant, permission from administration or grounds crew, without even the passing back and forth of a memo, someone had planted, then espaliered, a row of apricot and peach trees. In midsummer, just at the end of summer session, they were seen to bear fruit—heavy burnished apricots and big peaches swollen with juice that later disappeared and never seemed to reappear on the salad bars or the dessert bars in any of the dorms or fraternity houses. Nor were they sold at any hort department fund-raising sale, the way apples, Christmas trees, and bedding plants were. They just appeared and disappeared, unnoticed by most though legendary to the few who had stolen fruit, who kept an eye on the seed catalogues, wondering when these cultivars, the Moo U. cultivars, might be introduced to the open market.
In fact, though it stood much in the way of foot traffic from the Bovine Confinement Complex, the Business College, the Chemistry building, the foreign travel office, and graduate student housing, and though, as generations of freshman geographers had found, it stood on the exact geographical center of the campus (unless you included the recently constructed Vet School two miles to the south, which threw everything off), and though it was large and blocky, Old Meats had disappeared from the perceptions of the university population at large. This was fine with the horticulture department, for certain unnamed members and their student cadres had just this summer laid out an extension of the perennial border to the east, curving in wanton floral revelry toward Old Meats’ unused loading dock and Ames Road. So much, said the Chairman in private meetings with the rest of his faculty, for their assigned garden site, out by the physical plant and the bus barn, on a dead-end road that no one travelled unless lost. Guerrilla action, as he often remarked to the woman everyone including their children thought was his wife and whom he had met in SDS at the Chicago convention in 1969, was as protean and changeable as the needs of the people.
It was also true, however, that Bob Carlson, sophomore work-study student, was as invisible to the horticulturists, though he passed them every day, as Old Meats was to the rest of the campus. No busy digger or mulcher ever noticed him unlock the door beside the loading dock and enter, though he did it openly and in full view, often carrying bulky sacks. To them, Old Meats was a hillock in the center of the campus, a field for covering with vines and flowers; to Bob, it was a convenient job, an extension of his life on the farm, but instead of helping his dad feed and care for a thousand sows and their offspring, Bob tended to only one hog, a Landrace boar named Earl Butz. Right on Earl’s pen, Bob had taped up a sign that read, “Get big or get out.” Every time Bob saw that sign it gave him a chuckle. It was just the sort of joke his dad would appreciate, even though, of course, he had agreed to tell no one, not even his dad, about Earl, Earl’s venue, a sparkling new, clean, air-conditioned, and profoundly well-ventilated Ritz-Carlton of a room, or Earl’s business, which was eating, only eating, and forever eating.
Just now, as Bob entered, Earl Butz was at the trough, but he noted Bob’s arrival, acknowledging the young man with a flick of his ears and a switch of his little tail. Earl Butz was a good worker, who applied himself to his assigned task with both will and enjoyment. Already today he had cleaned the back end of his trough, and now he was working industriously toward the front, offering the low-pitched hog noises that expressed his suitability to his lot in life. Earl Butz had been eating for eighteen months, which was just exactly how old he was. He was white, white as cream cheese or sugar, and fastidious. Bob had noticed that every day, during his breaks from eating, he liked to nose and kick clean straw into a nice nest near the trough and far from the toileting area. Earl Butz also liked a bath, and had no objection to the lifting and cleaning of his trotters. He was an agreeable hog, and Bob liked him. At Christmas, Bob had purchased some large, sturdy red toys (a big ball, a hoop that hung from a ceiling beam, and a blanket) from a kennel catalogue. They had been Earl Butz’ first toys, and he played with them when he could fit the time into his work schedule.
Bob filled his trough, emptied and refilled his water reservoir, and scratched his back with a stick. He had been tending Earl Butz since November. He visited him five times every day, and Dr. Bo Jones, Earl’s owner, said that he was the best caretaker they’d found. Bob took the compliment for what it was, a testament to the fact that he felt more comfortable with Earl than he did with anyone else he had met since coming to the university. He had his own reasons for not telling his dad about Earl Butz, and they all revolved around the worry his family would experience when they found out that although he was doing fine in his classes, and eating and sleeping well, he had made no friends among the twenty-four thousand other students on the campus, and spent the time he should have spent at parties and bars in his room writing letters to kids from his high school, five letters to girls for every one to a guy, since girls liked to get them and always wrote back, and guys, well, it was hard to tell about guys. They all, at their jobs and colleges, seemed to be partying hearty and getting lucky on a regular schedule.
It was this very knowledge, that all his old friends were having the time of their lives, wherever they were, that had finally kept Bob on the campus all summer. His dad, though he missed the help with the farmwork, couldn’t sneer at the money—more than Bob would make at the A & W at home, and a real bite in the tuition bill. And, of course, it had never occurred to Dr. Bo Jones that Bob would even think of abandoning Earl Butz. The rapidity with which the two had become associated, even twinned, in Dr. Bo Jones’ mind would have astounded him, had he thought about it. But he was not in the habit of introspection.
“Hog,” he said, “is a mysterious creature, not much studied in the wild, owing to viciousness and elusiveness. Can’t get the papers, you know, to take yourself to Uzbekistan, even if you had the funding. Never been a hog that lived a natural lifespan. Never been an old hog. Hog too useful. Hog too useful to be known on his own terms, you know. What can I do with this hog, when can I eat it, what can I make of this hog, how does this hog profiteth me, always intervenes between man and hog. When I die, they’re going to say that Dr. Bo Jones found out something about hog.”
What the doctor was busy finding out about Earl Butz was how big he might grow if allowed to eat at will for all of his natural lifespan. To that end, he was fed corn, alfalfa, middlings, wheat, peanuts, soybeans, barley, a taste of molasses, and skim milk powder on a schedule devised by Dr. Bo Jones and contained in a secret file labelled “16TONS.Doc” on his home computer. Its companion file, into which he entered, late at night, the results of Earl Butz’ weigh-ins and other tests, was labelled “WHTYUGT.Doc.” Bob had never seen a printout of either file. He just received weekly instructions and turned in weekly test scores. It was a job. Dr. Bo Jones wasn’t unlike some of the eccentric farmers you might meet back home. Bob considered that reassuring.
He spent about half an hour with Earl Butz. This time of day, Earl was pretty busy. Mornings he was more playful. By ten, when Bob always returned for a last check, Earl would have turned in, sleeping soundly, his mounded bulk rolled up against the orange metal slats of his pen as if for comfort.
Outside of Earl’s pen, Old Meats was
dim and empty. The classes in slaughtering and meat cutting that had once been held there were long removed to the purview of the junior college forty miles away, along with hotel cooking, barbering, auto mechanics, cosmetology, and everything else that Bob’s dad and uncles would have considered respectable work. These days, no parade of animals marched to the holding pen and then, one by one, to the slaughtering floor. The meat locker was just a room now, its heavy door removed. The white enamel demonstration tables, still bolted to the cement in the stage area of the teaching amphitheater, canted dustily toward the center drain. No water ran from either spigot at the back of the area, nor from the faucets into the long, enamelled washing basin, nor had any use been found around the university for this equipment. Possibly it was not inventoried on any computer in any office, and had, therefore, ceased to exist.
Out in the twilight, Bob saw that the horticulturists had retreated for the day. Shadows lengthened across the lawns toward a warm August dusk. Where a woman was walking alone from the Ames Road parking lot, within days thousands of students and hundreds of faculty would be traversing the paths and sidewalks. Bob was looking forward to getting to know the new apartment-mates he had found in May, but maybe he preferred this sight. The woman’s dark, thick hair was piled in a loose bun. She wore a vibrant orange and yellow skirt, long and fluid, a crisp white sleeveless blouse with a sharply pointed collar, and orange shoes tied around slender ankles. Her summer tan stood out against the white of her blouse, and she didn’t look like any T-shirted undergraduate or crisply permed sorority girl Bob had ever seen on the campus. He wondered if she knew how she looked, if she had planned to look that way, or if, as often happened to him, she might come upon a mirror or a plate glass window and surprise herself with the way her dressing effort for the day had turned out. At least she would be pleasantly surprised. Bob’s usual experience ran quite the other way. She opened the door to Stillwater Hall, and disappeared inside.