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wi th his only task being that of eating and eating yet some more, until he
attains the maximum weight that is theoretically possible. Butz, of course,
is clueless about what is happening to him (pigs eat whenever slop hits the
trough), but he soon emerges as a lively emblem for the larger Moo
U.
community-its army of brain-dead undergraduates, most of the faculty,
and every incompetent administrator. The only grounds for controversy
about my last sentence-at least from those who have spent their lives at
versions of Moo U.-is that by now "incompetent administrator" is a
redundancy. "Touch this book and you touch a man," Walt Whitman's
persona proudly declared in
Leaves oj Grass;
meet with an administrator and
you encounter an incompetent-or so Smiley would have us believe.
Perhaps, but the sheer amount of reductive portraiture she packs into her
pages begins to grow tiresome. In far too many cases, what we are treated
to are Punch and Judy puppets dolled up in academic suiting, people who
move through their paces as Smiley pulls the strings rather than pulling out
the stops.
Setting her story in the 1989-90 academic year, Smiley could hardly
avoid the rich material that political correctness has served up. But like
most of the faculty at Moo
u.,
she gives the subject only a passing nod.
Only Chairman X, a sixties radical who continues to mourn the passing of
Communism, takes the infinite variety of campus-based ideologies with
any degree of seriousness: " It was well known among the citizens of the
state," he tells us early on, "that the university had pots of money and that
there were highly paid faculty members in every department who had once
taught Marxism and now taught something called deconstruction which
was only Marxism gone underground in preparation for emergence at a
time of national weakness." For better or worse, this view quickly folds into
the larger heap of superstitions that consign each group to the isolation of
its own unquestioned viewpoint (the very last thing that happens at Moo
U.
is candid debate) and that makes Moo
U.
the anti-university it most
assuredly is.
Such a world threatens to implode (that's what Ivar Harstad, Moo's
provost, is really worried about), but as those who have read the novel
know, Smiley's serves up an exploding pig instead. Poor Butz never had a
chance because he is the plaything of a mad scientist who reminds us of
nothing so much as a Frankenstein with a sharp eye on pork futures. There
was a time, of course, when colleges had one or two modest goals; and
claims to universality of the sort that makes hearts beat faster at Moo U.
were not among them. No longer. Now, anything goes, all of which gives
Harstad the night sweats:
