Now Playing: One of Stephen's piano pieces.

Last night I finished Moo by Jane Smiley. This book was a graduation gift, so I was compelled to read it at some point. For those of you with strong sensibilities, beware--the language and subject matter extend past the Chaucerian in bawdiness.

Moo is a satire of academic life, set in a midwestern town at a large state university. Thanks to that setting, one point of humor arose from the outset since aspects of the novel's setting mirror the setting in which I have grown up. (To make a not-so-subtle parallel, one of the buildings on the novel's campus is named Stillwater Hall). Unfortunately, satire has never been a favorite genre of mine, so my reading of this book was biased from the outset.

More humorous at times were the parodies of the academic writing style and of interdepartmental arguments. I don't often laugh out loud over books, and this book is definitely not one to provoke that kind of mirth, but occasionally the parallels were just too strong, and I had to smile.

Smiley's sense of the poignant is also strong in the book, though, and such moments were what made the book valuable. Her telling observations about her characters reflected to me the emptiness of a lifestyle without Christ, even as she parodied the complacent self-righteous Christianity that some academics seem to assume to be the definition of faith. She strips the masks from her characters' motives, revealing pure animal desires as well as the emptiness the characters find as they follow those desires. Lives full of sad humor seem to be the fate of midwestern humanity, at least according to Smiley, though she ends on a triumphant note--a marriage, of course.

All-in-all, this is not a book I would necessarily recommend to anyone. Having said that, its humor and poignancy made for several thought-provoking moments. And now I'm (supposedly) ready for academia! Hooray.