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.