Volume 42, Number 13 · August 10, 1995
The Way We Live Now
By Cathleen Schine
Moo
by Jane Smiley
Knopf, 414 pp., $24.00
At the center of Moo stands Earl Butz, a pig. He is literally at the center, the subject of a secret experiment being conducted in a building called Old Meats, once the scene of classes in slaughtering, now an abandoned wreck in the geographical heart of a huge, Midwestern agricultural university affectionately called Moo U. The point of the experiment is to observe what happens when a pig's life is pure; when a hog fulfills its essential nature, when, uninterrupted, it can do what it has been bred to do, which is: eat. From his clandestine, luxurious pen, Earl Butz selflessly serves science while all around him swirls the life of a university.
Review, 1963 words
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