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PARTISAN REVIEW
Which brings me (at long last) to three recent novels that not only
reflect certain changes in the academic landscape, but that also might con–
stitute a short reading list for those still skeptical about the very enterprise
of fictions set on university campuses: Jane Smiley's
Moo
(1995), John
L'Heureux's
The Handmaid of Desire
(1996), and Richard Russo's
Straight
Man
(1997). Of the group, Smiley's is probably the weakest because it tries
to pack too many disparate types between one set of hard covers, and
because far too much of the plot revolves around a pig secretly being fat–
tened up under the very noses of those going about the dailiness of their
daily (academic) life. Smiley's point, of course, is that large Midwestern
universities are now more akin to corporations than they are to institutions
of higher learning, and that generating dollars is much more important
than mulling over ideas. Power is what makes this world go around, and
clout comes to those who can breed a gigantic pig or use their economic
savvy to exploit foreign countries. Meanwhile, the others continue to stare
at the walls of their particular caves, reasonably content in their del uded lot.
Smiley is best known for
A Thousand Acres,
her lyrical evocation of
Iowa farm life as it recapitulates the rhythms-and often the plot line-of
King Lear. Moo
is decidedly slimmer goods, but its sense of how universi–
ties currently operate is a welcome addition to the pile of fiction narrowly
focused on whether or not a sad sack like Roger Ackroyd should get
tenure. Near the end of Smiley's doorstopper of a novel, a provost finds
himself mulling over the very question that
Moo
has explored from every
possible angle-namely, "What is a university?" No clear answer comes to
mind. That's the good news, as it were, because we are thus spared pontif–
ications on his (and Smiley's) part. The bad news, of course, is that
universities not only resemble corporations, but in truth have
become
them.
Given shrinking budgets at the state legislature and the inertia of excess to
be seen everywhere on
Moo's
campus, something will have to give. But
what? Surely not the buildings already completed or those in the planning
stage; surely not programs in place or promised, much less the professors
who lobby for ever-larger budgets. And most assuredly not anything
remotely connected to athletic programs that provide undergraduates with
the "bread and circus" of big-time football games. In short,
Moo's
provost
is in something of a pickle because he cannot pull off what corporations
regularly do: downsize. Like the layers of hucksters below him, he goes
along to get along, and he milks the cow until there is a good chance it
will drop dead.
Moo U. may be the ironic nickname of a midwestern agriversity, but
in Smiley's novel it is Earl Butz, an enormous experimental pig, who gets
top billing as the symbol of everything the provost is worrying about. Butz
quite literally lives an underground life at the dead center of the campus,
