As a microcosm of today's Western world Jane Smiley gives us a midwestern university nicknamed (in honor of its devotion to agriculture) Moo U. In the wake of the profligate eighties, Moo is desperate for money and rife with intrigues and machinations - private, public, sexual, intellectual, financial, technological, domestic, global, social, and political.

Smiley's tone is so cool that laughter comes without warning as she lightly balances a cosmic cast (everybody in bed with somebody in the romantic or French-farcical or Washington, D.C., sense) that includes top-salaried Dr. Lionel Gift, poet laureate of consumerism, who refers to the students as customers...Chairman X of the horticulture department, who is so pure and classical a leftist that it hasn't occurred to him to marry his wife of twenty years...the power behind all thrones: the dean's middle-aged secretary, Mrs. Walker, who knows more than J. Edgar Hoover ever knew about one and all...the small, folksy, jug-eared Texas billionaire who's tempting hungry Moo U with funds for his own mysterious agenda.

And, at the secret heart of the campus, an unauthorized experimental project involving an (increasingly) large and touching creature who is a living symbol of unleashed desire and consumption.