Jane Smiley s new novel--the first since her Pulitzer
Prize-winning best-seller, 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 she
gives us a midwestern university nicknamed (in
honor of its devotion to agriculture) Moo U. In
the wake of the profligate eighties, Moo is desperate
for money and rife with intrigues and machina-
tions-private, public, sexual, intellectual, financial,
technological, domestic, global, social, and politi-
cal. 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 cus-
tomers... Chairman X of the horticulture depart-
ment, who is so pure and classical a leftist that it
hasn t occurred to him to marry his wife of twenty
years . . . the power behind all thrones: the dean s
middle-aged secretary, Mrs. Walker, who knows
more than J. Edgar Hoover ever knew about one
and all.., the small, folksy, jug-cared Texas billion-
aire who s tempting hungry Moo U with funds for
his own mysterious agenda. And, at the secret heart
of the campus, an unauthorized experimental proj-
ect involving an (increasingly ) large and touching
creature who is a living symbol of unleashed desire
and constimption.
Everybody s here: young, old, left, right, black,
white, philistine, esthete the whole crowd. Never
raising her voice, giving everybody his or her (or its)
due, Jane Smiley lets no one escape least of all the
reader, whom she sweeps up in waves of comedy,
insight, and just plain reading pleasure.
發表於2024-12-25
Moo: a Novel 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
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Moo: a Novel 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載