Jane Smiley s new novel--the first since her Pulitzer<br /> Prize-winning best-seller, A Thousand Acres is her<br /> most ambitious (and delicious) yet: a rich, blackly<br /> comic, brilliantly on-target send-up of our society.<br /> As a microcosm of today s Western world she<br /> gives us a midwestern university nicknamed (in<br /> honor of its devotion to agriculture) Moo U. In<br /> the wake of the profligate eighties, Moo is desperate<br /> for money and rife with intrigues and machina-<br /> tions-private, public, sexual, intellectual, financial,<br /> technological, domestic, global, social, and politi-<br /> cal. Smiley s tone is so cool that laughter comes<br /> without warning as she lightly balances a cosmic cast<br /> (everybody in bed with somebody in the romantic<br /> or French-farcical or Washington, D.C., sense) that<br /> includes top-salaried Dr. Lionel Gift, poet laureate<br /> of consumerism, who refers to the students as cus-<br /> tomers... Chairman X of the horticulture depart-<br /> ment, who is so pure and classical a leftist that it<br /> hasn t occurred to him to marry his wife of twenty<br /> years . . . the power behind all thrones: the dean s<br /> middle-aged secretary, Mrs. Walker, who knows<br /> more than J. Edgar Hoover ever knew about one<br /> and all.., the small, folksy, jug-cared Texas billion-<br /> aire who s tempting hungry Moo U with funds for<br /> his own mysterious agenda. And, at the secret heart<br /> of the campus, an unauthorized experimental proj-<br /> ect involving an (increasingly ) large and touching<br /> creature who is a living symbol of unleashed desire<br /> and constimption.<br /> Everybody s here: young, old, left, right, black,<br /> white, philistine, esthete the whole crowd. Never<br /> raising her voice, giving everybody his or her (or its)<br /> due, Jane Smiley lets no one escape least of all the<br /> reader, whom she sweeps up in waves of comedy,<br /> insight, and just plain reading pleasure.