Readers Go Back To College At Moo U. Jane Smiley Uses Her Wit And Style To Bring This Fictitious Agricultural College Experience To Her Readers.

“Moo” by Jane Smiley (Knopf, 414 pages, $24)

Certain incidents of anyone’s college years merit neither recollection nor reflection, but this new exploration of academe’s gritty halls, cafeterias, classrooms, dorms, flower beds, faculty bedrooms and horse barns has an appalling familiarity. So, take a minute to remember:

Were you ever recruited by a campus support group for people seized by an uncontrollable urge to tear up their clothes and braid them into rag rugs?

Did you keep your vow never to tell any Sigma Chi, Pike or SAE you dated that you once reigned a whole year as a county Pork Queen?

Did you pledge a sorority because it would teach you how to choose the right shade of lipstick and was, therefore, the “first step to a successful executive career”?

Did you respond to the dietitian’s survey about your favorite nutrient with a firm, unhesitating “Bud”?

If you answered “yes” or even “huh?” to any of these questions, be warned: Jane Smiley wrote her darkly hilarious new satire just for you.

“Moo” is an unsettling swerve from the geographic and psychological prairies of Smiley’s previous novel, the Pulitzer Prizewinning, best-selling “A Thousand Acres.” But by Page 5, it will have you (as it had us) laughing so loudly and helplessly that other people in the supermarket check-out line will begin to murmur (as they did on our behalf) whether the manager ought to be summoned.

That Smiley is one of our most skillful tracers of the interactions that drive couples, families and social groups toward cohesion or dysfunction is beyond doubt. But if the author of “A Thousand Acres” was poignant and merciful in the face of Zebulon County’s rich, rolling bleakness, the author of “Moo” is all deadpan ferocity. This time, along with her perceptions, Smiley also has sharpened her teeth and claws.

The “Moo” of the title is Moo U., a “revered agricultural and technical institution of higher learning” located somewhere in the Midwest. If it is not quite, as libidinous associate professor of English Timothy Monahan sometimes regrets, “Yale (where Hersey had been), not Princeton (where Oates still was), not the University of Michigan (Delbanco), or of Wisconsin (where Lorrie Moore got to enjoy the fabled pleasures of Madison), not Duke (Reynolds Price), or Iowa (Frank Conroy),” Moo U. nonetheless provides “a good job, an enviable job, two courses a semester, little committee work” and sufficient opportunities to fool around.

There is, in fact, a fair amount of fooling around in this book, but Smiley clearly is far more interested in that more insidious urge, greed.

Goods are good at Moo U. Students are “customers,” and everyone who shows up around here seems to want something.

Moo plays out in 70 short chapters - a few presented simply as news clippings, writing assignments and memos - that sometimes seem so casually related as to be in danger of becoming frayed with loose ends. But Smiley never drops a stitch. She moves her more than 30 characters on and off stage with a confidence that is almost dizzying, and her eye for the telling detail never blinks.

Out at Iowa State University, where Smiley is professor of English, the phone lines and E-mail links between the various profs, associate profs and assistant profs must be humming: Did that young woman who worked on the cafeteria line and got engaged to the dean really run off with a married trucker named Travis? Do you think there really was a faculty dinner party where everyone got so drunk no one noticed when the hostess’ aged mother passed away at the table, and that she was “left to herself, just her legs covered with an afghan and the drink removed from her grasp, until the roast beef and coffee could sober everyone up”?

Smiley noticed. Good for her. Good for us.