Moo U : The superheated life of a university community : MOO, <i> By Jane Smiley (Alfred A. Knopf: $24; 414 pp.)</i>

Satire, as show-biz has it, is what closes Saturday night. That says more about show-biz than about satire, but properly adjusted it makes a point. Satire is great but it oughtn’t to run on into next week.

For an author whose novels are as emotionally arduous as Jane Smiley’s--her muse must shed 15 pounds each time she wrestles with it--a carousal on the order of “Moo” must be a relief. For the reader it is fun but perhaps not quite as much fun. It is a playful takeoff on too many things, all crowded together and happening at once. Among its topics are the superheated life of a university community, the schemes and vanities of academe, the utter flatness of the Midwest, men who are powerful and crass and women who are foolish enough to give in to them (or try to be like them); men who are unsuccessful and nice and women for whom the ideal lover is a long-haul truck driver (drives hard and doesn’t hang around).

At her best--I like her novella “Ordinary Love” as much as anything she’s done--Smiley makes a rare fusion of literary and polemical strengths. At other times it is less a fusion than a tussle: in “A Thousand Acres,” for instance, where a pithy vision of farms and farm families is forced around the armature of a “King Lear” plot as a way of making a point about incest.

“Moo” is all points, but Smiley doesn’t force them. She strings them loosely on a loose story about the political pressures that try to shrink Moo University (originally a land-grant agricultural college), a baleful billionaire who wants to subsidize it to advance his schemes and a last-minute rescue that puts everything miraculously right. The story flares and subsides and ends in a deliberately improbable “and they all lived happily ever after.”

Smiley is plainly more interested in her satirical and thematic points, which she embodies in nearly two dozen individual stories, each dropping in and out of the principal one. There is Lionel Gift, the academic superstar who jets around the world reforming the economies of small countries to conform to the principles of free enterprise. His religion, Smiley writes, was the production of consumer goods; God, as the author of all those stars, planets and nebulae, was the Supreme Producer.

There is Nils, agronomist and missionary for the Green Revolution that brought hybrid corn, pesticides and industrial agriculture to the Third World. He is opposed by X, chairman of the horticulture department. A fiery former Marxist and eccentric, X detests the effect of big agriculture on small human cultures. He sees the struggle as “row planting vs. bed planting, monoculture vs. polyculture, mechanical cultivation vs. human cultivation, fertilizer vs. compost, feed crops vs. food crops.”

There is Margaret Bell, a brilliant black English professor but an innocent in the tactics of career advancement; and Cate, a brilliant black chemist who is a comically cold tactician; sympathetic, too, in that he is simply using the Establishment’s methods against itself. There is Jellinek, who persuades four huge corporations to bid for his scheme to increase milk production by chemically inducing false labor symptoms in cows. His grantsmanship is better than his science; he can’t actually get the trick done.

There is Ivar, the long-suffering provost who struggles to preserve what he can in the face of cost-cutting and the pressures of Arlen Martin, a “jug-eared Texan” chicken magnate--shades of Ross Perot and Frank Perdue--who will finance the university in exchange for research work on his projects. He has a secret scheme to set up a huge gold strip-mining project on the site of a precious cloud forest in Costa Rica.

The resistance, which eventually brings on a public scandal and Martin’s retreat, is managed by Lorraine Walker, Ivar’s secretary and the book’s best character. With her network of connections, her mastery of the computer and her dragonish personality she gets things done to suit both her convictions and her interests. She transfers funds from the athletics budget to the library, for example, to pay researchers to track down Martin’s maneuvers. A kind of Jeeves with fangs--the university’s rules “were a subset of Lorraine Walker’s”--she stokes her energies in nightly sessions of energetic sex with her woman lover.

Sex and the politics of gender are at the heart of most of the individual stories. Smiley, whose feminism is roughly Gilliganesque, shows little interest in correctness. Her bent is piracy and pleasure. Except for one pitiable careerist, all her women are heroines. Some, like Walker and Helen--who cooks mighty meals, powers the Romance Languages department and engages in fiery middle-aged sex with the delicate but saintly Ivar--are chieftains. Others are victims who, like the woman who flees her Christian fundamentalist fiance for a truck driver, turn rebel.

The men get a much firmer hand. Unlike the women, they are not to be allowed power. Virtue, kindness, sexiness, warmth, neediness and genius are welcome as long as it is understood that no power shall result. Ivar fights for good things but authority is with his secretary. Chairman X’s obsessions and erratic randiness irk both his longtime companion and his mistress, but they manage him well and the only power he really wants is to be able to raise hell--he instigates the anti-Martin riots--and his garden.

There is considerable wit in all this. Smiley’s provocative intelligence ranges widely. She knows farming, genetics, how a university budget is torn apart, how tenure meetings go, what it is like to have a stroke, how politics is played and how things feel. One of the best scenes comes when a loutish white student mutters “nigger” at Mary, a black classmate who tries to sit down at his table. Disbelieving, she asks him to repeat it, and he does. Her friends rally tactfully but they are too tactful. Screaming is needed. The word has done damage and the repetition has done double damage. Until a stroke of justice comes at the end, Mary is on the point of giving college up.

There are many such end strokes. An eccentric inventor bequeaths to the university the design for a revolutionary planter and harvester that will earn it a fortune. If a deus ex machina --a machina ex deus, rather--could come with a tongue in its cheek, this would be one. Smiley’s story has the caprice of a fable, part-satirical and part-serious.

If neither satire nor seriousness entirely works it is because the author’s hand grows heavy and because the weight is imposed too long and too simultaneously over too many stories. It takes Smiley a great deal of space to introduce her 2 dozen characters at the start and dispatch them all at the end. It is endless expository packing and unpacking and the need, at each stage of the story, to move them all along, one by one or two by two. In the slow, lateral checkerboard advance, none of the pieces are taken--except for the inventor who dies--and they all remain crowding the board from start to finish.