HOW HIGH THE MOO?

By Pico Iyer

Is 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 of Warren County, Iowa.

Moo (Knopf; 414 pages; $24) is something of a runaway hog itself, a 10,000-acre comic novel set in what might almost be called Animal Farm State.

Moo U. is a huge Midwestern agricultural college of 37,000 students, where professors are funded by "Mid-America Pork By-Products," conduct research on plant pathology and soils science and read papers on "The Use of Strain-Specific Monoclonal Antibodies to Model the Field Spread of Soybean Mosaic Virus."

More than that, the campus is a riotous assemblage of types as various as the Deadly Sins. There are students who keep cigarettes in refrigerators and an inventor who, after a "brain attack," only moos. Secretaries sell Amway products by telephone, and computer nerds get million-dollar grants to work on "calf-free lactation." One whole chapter is given over to the inner thoughts and agonies of Earl Butz, a "very fastidious hog" who is described quite as sympathetically as the two-legged creatures around him: "At bottom, he was still the hog he had always been, the hog he was bound to be, and he was bound to eat. That was his genius and his burden."

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.

These clashing interests and interesting clashes all converge in a nefarious scheme to mine gold in the world's largest remaining virgin cloud forest, in Costa Rica. Left battles right, state clashes 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."

As 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, no Smiley face is without its sadness.