‘Moo’ Author Refuses To Be Cowed By Critics

With “Moo,” her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Thousand Acres,” firmly on the best-seller lists, Jane Smiley can afford to be light-hearted about the critical reception it has received.

She points out, for instance, that many critics have appreciated “Moo,” a comic novel released last month about a large, agriculturally oriented Iowa university not unlike Iowa State University, where she teaches.

Some people were not amused.

One reviewer, Richard Eder of the Los Angeles Times, wrote: “If neither satire nor seriousness entirely work, it is because the author’s hand grows heavy….” Others have harrumphed and intimated that Smiley was writing lightweight stuff, not at all up to the level of “A Thousand Acres,” the “Lear”influenced work that was a dark portrait of an Iowa farm family. It won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1992.

As for the naysayers, Smiley, 45, says she saw it all coming. She had a feeling that everybody doesn’t love a clown.

“It just makes me laugh because I wrote an article for Civilization magazine about changing forms and writing a comic novel,” she says. “I talked about what I expected reviewers to write about this novel.

“And I said I expected bad reviews because when I was reading a lot of comic novels, and reviews of comic novels, a few years ago, I was astounded at how bad the reviews were, and how mean they were, even books I really liked, like (Garrison Keillor’s) ‘WLT’ or (Nora Ephron’s) ‘Heartburn.’

“I finally decided that comedy is really a much more complex form - it’s less predictable how people will react to it - because humor is much more a matter of personal taste than a ‘serious’ or tragic novel.”

It should be noted that Smiley was not a likely candidate to write a comic novel. All her previous eight works of fiction were straightforward literary efforts, often with everyday family life as a dominant theme. But in other ways, they’ve varied widely.

“The Greenlanders,” published in 1988, was inspired by Icelandic family sagas and is set in the 14th century. It’s a remarkably vivid re-creation of a time and place generally thought to be uninteresting.

As for “A Thousand Acres,” it depicts not only the disintegration of American farm life in general but also one Iowa farm family in particular. (Larry Cook, the scion of the farm, commits incest with two daughters.)

Then there’s Smiley herself. She comes across as brisk and efficient, a keen and intelligent observer but not exactly on a lifelong search for laughs. Even when she’s talking about comedy, it’s with a certain detached tone that could be just as easily used for, say, discussing tragedy.

Consider, too, how she went about writing “Moo.” Known for doing meticulous research for her novels, Smiley read dozens of comic novels and dissected them carefully to see what worked and what didn’t.

You get the feeling she was the kind of student in high school who turned in term papers a week before anybody else.

Yet, she allows, “In some ways, this narrative is much closer to who I really am than say, the narrative of Ginny (one of the abused daughters) in ‘A Thousand Acres.’ I think the narrators in my novellas were probably close to me as well, but this is the side of me that emerges with friends.”

Smiley talks with affection about her three children and discusses her relatively recent literary fame with good-natured skepticism - “I view a lot of the Pulitzer aftermath as an intrusion rather than an opportunity. But it’s an intrusion and not an invasion.”