Word: smileyness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...there anything Jane Smiley cannot do? In between writing penetrating tales of domestic heartbreak (in novellas such as The Age of Grief), she tossed off a 582-page novel that drew upon her knowledge of Old Icelandic (The Greenlanders). Now, having won the Pulitzer Prize and a permanent place in America's gallery of tragedians with A Thousand Acres, a punishingly dark look at sexual abuse that brought King Lear into the American heartland, she comes up with a 414-page campus satire that culminates in the encounter of a 700-lb. runaway hog and a former Pork Queen...
...Smiley writes of what she knows, and she seems to know just about everything-the incubation of eggs, Cheez-It diets, tenure committees. Most of all, she knows men, women and the distance between them. Most men, she notes, are "competent in groups that mimicked the playground, incompetent in groups that mimicked the family"; many of her women assess love interests in terms of self-interest. Much of the fun of the book, in fact, comes from the way in which a canny student of human nature trains her eye on people who know nothing about any kind of nature...
...with university, and faculty members pummel one another in front of TV cameras. Some of them see the campus as a marketplace, some as a battlefield, some as a pickup joint and some as a "passing microclimate." None of them think it may be a place of learning. As Smiley notes wryly of one academic, "The well-known reluctance of midwesterners to talk about actual sums of money worked in his favor, since refusal to talk about it made it the unspoken subject of every exchange...
...jaunty and straightforward as its title, Moo allows Smiley to turn literary and stylistic cartwheels all around the gym. She writes course-catalog entries, student-fiction papers and newspaper articles (even in Spanish). She masters billionaire talk, bovine-cloning monologues and the shrewd counsel of black elder sisters. In its easy virtuosity and wicked glee, Moo is rather like one of those comic novels in which John Updike gives himself a holiday from more draining work. And if Moo finally has more of a target than a point, it never allows us to forget that, in a certain context...
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley's campus satire (Knopf; 414 pages; $24) is centered on Moo U, a huge Midwestern agricultural college where professors are funded by "Mid-America Pork By-Products," an inventor moos after suffering a "brain attack" and secretaries sell Amway products by telephone. "As jaunty and straightforward as its title, 'Moo' allows Smiley to turn literary and stylistic cartwheels all around the gym," saysTIME critic Pico Iyer. "It is rather like one of those comic novels in which John Updike gives himself a holiday from more draining work...