Details of midwest topography, weather and culture are rendered with unerring authenticity. A quartet of women roommates who all hide secrets from each other, an unscrupulous ``little Texan with jug ears'' who wants to give the college tainted money, and a stuffy dean who thinks that anything he desires is God's will are some of the large cast of characters that Smiley manipulates with remarkable ease-and though some portrayals verge on caricature, she never goes over the line. A chapter titled ``Who's in Bed With Whom'' clears things up in that department-but only temporarily, since musical beds is a continuous game. Bo Jones, who is conducting a secret experiment on an appealing boar named Earl Butz (Earl and the horses on campus are nicer than the humans by a mile) and a superlatively bossy secretary who is a lot smarter than the Ph.Ds she serves. Lionel Gift, an intellectual whore who calls students ``customers'' and is willing to skew research to further his name and line his pocketbook Dr. Among the more egregious types that Smiley portrays are Dr. has an agenda: academic, sexual, social, economic, political and philosophical. The setting is a large midwestern agricultural college known as Moo U., whose faculty and students Smiley depicts with sophisticated humor, turning a gimlet eye on the hypocrisy, egomania, prejudice and self-delusion that flourish on campus-and also reflect society at large. Effortlessly switching gears after the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, Smiley delivers a surprising tour de force, a satire of university life that leaves no aspect of contemporary academia unscathed.
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