Having mentioned my bedtime reading habits, it’s probably a good time to record that the first bedtime book of 2004 was Moo, a remarkable and hilarious novel of life at a large research university in the Great American Midwest. I’ll happily admit that the book is a great big mess. It reminds me of Tony Kushner’s dictum that making a play is like making a lasagna, and that the trick is to put in as much good stuff as possible without collapsing the whole structure. I don’t, generally, agree with this approach to making lasagna or plays, but that’s clearly what happened in this novel, and it works. Of course, to do this effectively, you have to start with good noodles and lay them in just right, although nobody will remember them; Jane Smiley wrote a very clever book whose cleverness is obscured by exuberant silliness.
It’s been some time since we finished it, and what sticks with me, I suppose, are the characters, particularly Mrs. Loraine Walker, Chairman X, Loren Stroop, and of course Earl Butz. I was disappointed in the end, and as a fiend for narrative found that bits of the middle dragged (it’s like Nicholas Nickleby, for that), and I don’t think I’ll pick it back up off the shelf for a while, but I’m glad we chose it.
If some Gentle Reader wants to pick it up, let me pose this Readers’ Question: the interaction of the idea of America, famously rootless, and the idea of the Land, roots and all, seems to me to be played out in this book allusively, rather than directly. The sense that Land is History (in a way that cattle and pigs aren’t, you understand) is assumed, rather than expressed. Or did I miss it? I bring it up (and actually would like an answer) because that idea of Land as History keeps cropping up in various things I’ve been reading and seeing lately, and I think Ms. Smiley does buy into that, but doesn’t emphasize it, in what one would think would be an obvious choice in this particular book.
,
-Vardibidian.
If I’m understanding what you mean by the idea that Land is History, I would say that the idea of Land as History (or land as fate?) is treated dialectically in _Moo_. It is occasionally expressed pretty directly. Its fullest expression, I think, in Smiley’s description of Chairman X’s way of seeing the Moo campus in chapter 8 of part 1 (pp. 37-41). This idea, deeply held by the Chairman, is in conflict with the contrary ideas, deeply held by Lionel Gift and Nils Harstad, that Money is History (or fate) or that God is History (or fate).