The Oranging of America and Other Stories

by Max Apple

The author of these short stories focuses his attention on Monte Hall, nuclear physics, Howard Johnson, and a national leader from Grand Rapids

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, American, 20th Century, American Fiction, Literature

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Mitch Albom · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a quirky and delightful book by, in my view, a very under-appreciated writer.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Orange. There's an orange at the head of our state ; perhaps more an orang=u=tan, no offense to our Darwinian cousins.

If you must know however the title story is not so much of Rump as of Howard Johnson and his hotels/restaurants and not so much that as his road buddy and her cryogenic plans and not so much that probably as something about something very american.

Orange, in addition to the roofs of HoJo's, is also the color of Home Depot, a phenom which swept the nation decades ago and--who knows--is here to stay? (I often go in just to harass the forklift driver ; I don't even buy a single 2x4). Orange is also the color of many foods. Theroux's essay on orange begins "Orange is a bold, forritsome color". (I don't know what 'forritsome' means ; I read it nonetheless). That essay is published by Henry Holt so, yes, it was edited ; but I don't know if it was fact=checked so I can't say for sure whether orange really is 'forritsome'. And I saw a pic of President Obama yesterday in which he was holding an orange coffee cup which is apparently a gesture of solidarity against gun violence or something (I know I know ; until recently he was the world's largest perpetrator of gun violence).

Please enjoy the titles of the stories included here ::
[eponymous]
Selling Out (about capitalism if it's about anything)
Vegetable Love (Call Any Vegetable)
Inside Norman Mailer (a real literary throw=down)
The Yogurt of Vasirin Kefirovsky (read as I'm reading Einstein's Beets ; VK has some serious food aversions)
Understanding Alvarado (In which Castro plays ball)
Gas Stations (nostalgia for ugly america and related issues)
My Real Estate (finally a vision to do something useful with those hideous and worthless sports temples)
Noon (murder on a Television GameShow ; you'll hear where DFW got one of his numbers maybe)
Patty-Cake, Patty-Cake...a Memoir (sigh, can a white man write a black first-person POV? yes.)

@Cody :: I was wrong about my source for discovering Apple. Not Frederick R. Karl but rather McCaffery in his Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s.

At any rate, this here volume, pub'd in 1976 probably should be read by every student of DFW. You'll hear his interests and themes echoing back yet a decade deeper into america's past. Roughly speaking. There's got to be, for those who go to such lengths of 'influence' (not the claim I am making here), some evidence of some mention of "Apple" somewhere maybe at least once in the DFW archive. I mean, because I think Apple's book here is just probably more important to the general picture of lit production in the '70's than its total obscurity today would indicate (cf the McCaffery).

I don't know much about short stories and judging them and evaluating them and ranking them and things of this nature ; but every story in here could count as, at a minimum, 'satisfying'. If you're a student of short stories, you'll need you an apple.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title piece sets the mannered amusing tone that follows—polite, informed, clever humour with unprovocative satirical touches. I read this collection amid the splendour of the snowcapped peaks of Glencoe, in a mental state one might call “not unbalanced”, meaning I was more tolerant of the light whimsy, and republican whiff of the thing than I might have been in the unrelenting torment of the metropolis. Several of the stories here concern healthy eating, such as ‘Vegetable Love’, featuring a man who skinnies down to recapture an errant lover, and ‘The Yoghurt of Vasirin Kefirovsky’, where a screwloose professor subsides entirely on homemade yoghurt to the chagrin of his wife. Stories like the title piece and ‘My Real Estate’ raise middle-class chuckles and tend to the smug and comfortable, where the best humour should distort and provoke. There is enough play in evidence to keep this one a winner, such as the barbed pastiche ‘Inside Norman Mailer’, and the darker Q+A piece ‘Noon’. Best read in three-star Glencoe hotels.

[Graham P · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never read a book so thoroughly mid-1970's.

Think orange and browns, oversized sunglasses, wheatgrass enemas, and a two-pack-a-day habit chased down with cocktail hour at 1pm. Think of a Cadillac El Dorado parked in front of Howard Johnson's, or what it would be like to live inside the Astrodome, or sitting in on a meeting where Nixon and Fidel Castro share donuts with Norman Mailer and Gerald Ford. This is absurdism lite, competent and occasionally brilliant, but like a digestible short story in last month's New Yorker, there is really little to remember besides the occasional laugh and the consistent, medicinal clarity of prose. Barthelme-lite, a time capsule wrapped in corduroy and polyester blends. Yes, baby boomers, if you want to revisit The Bicentennial, turtle wax your ride, give Max Apple a chance.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much of this seems to work the same way the magical realism works: something is made concrete and literal, real figures and events are mixed with fiction, things are taken absolutely seriously in a way that shows them to be ridiculous. But it's about america, so it feels more familiar to me, and yet also much more disorienting and odd.

I think the two most prevalent and interesting motifs in this light are the appearance of historical figures and, oddly, food. Or perhaps not oddly, as the strange food behavior does seem to get at something very american in attitudes toward food: food can save you, become a kind of religion, create practically magical outcomes, make you a moral person (or an immoral one), find or lose you true love, lead you to your own best self, to knowledge, to beauty, to truth.

Or this: take the belief that the outcome of sporting events actually tells you something about the relative merits of the countries involved, throw in the (contradictory) idea that the real problem with trade restrictions is that you can't shop for baseball players in Cuba.

Imagine the various ways in which those beliefs can be concretized and literalized in inventive fiction from the seventies, and you have a pretty good idea of what this book is like.

Now off with you: you must work out the anxiety of influence by boxing with Norman Mailer.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Don't say you hadn't been warned. The prophets have been in the desert wailing and warning -- in this case, Max Apple and Noam Chomsky -- wearing sackcloth and ashes, for years, nay, decades! ;; but you hearkened not -- 109 Ratings · 14 Reviews -- bowing down and worshiping your golden franzens and your golden tartts. But there is always some other opening, some time to come ; history is always just around the corner, waiting for you to come back to your senses. Be a go(o)dly nation now and wipe that orange off your face.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1976, the ten stories in this collection will find readers among those who enjoy stories of the early T. C. Boyle (which were published ten years later). And if you are a fan of George Saunders, he really has nothing on the early Max Apple, so Saunders fans should definitely seek out this hard to find collection.

[Shanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of weird-ish stories, mostly about business/economy/capitalism.

1. “The Oranging of America” **** A hotel/restaurant developer populates the U.S. with his orange-roofed chain.
2. “Selling Out” ** A man sits on the stock floor for a day and almost triples his money.
3. “Vegetable Love” ** A man’s vegetarian girlfriend leaves him, so he tries to win her back by drastically altering his diet, but in the search for her he finds someone new.
4. “Inside Norman Mailer” ** A boxing match-up between a boxer and a writer.
5. “The Yogurt of Vasirin Kefirovsky *** A man touts the benefits of a yogurt and mahn diet.
6. “Understanding Alvarado” **** Castro and an ex-baseball-star play ball to decide whether a Cuban baseball star should return to America to collect his pension, but Alvarado makes the decision for himself.
7. “Gas Stations” ** While at a modern gas station, a man reminisces about the great times of service stations which actually offered true service.
8. “My Real Estate” *** A man is taken under the wing of the owner of a baseball stadium.
9. “Noon” * A man tells his defense attorney why he shot a game-show host on air.
10. “Patty-Cake, Patty-Cake… A Memoir **** One young man takes over his father’s bakery, another becomes a politician; doughnuts and respect are the foundation for their friendship.

[Llopin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Apple seems to be interested, particularly, on: a) the USA, b) businesses and c) food (no pun intented, given his name). Carverian love stories get tangled with the joys of profoundly american postmodernism. That is, remarkable interest given on historical figures, seminal cultural icons and peculiar, funny situations. Writing is mostly excellent and hilarious at times, even if some stories don't go anywhere (a problem also shared with TC Boyle, to whom someone here compared to Apple), you cannot fault Apple's imagination. His creativity is to be admired; his prose is phenomenal; his plotting, irregular. No wonder good ole Barthelme enjoyed this book. Although he'd go for more experimental and convoluted forms, the quirk remains the same.

[E. C. Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

These stories are good. Exactly, precisely, only good. Not just okay, not great. Having seen Max Apple's short story collection, The Oranging of America, referred to dozens of times in the pomosphere, I looked to this as required reading and hoped to find another evolutionary link between the rambunctiousness of, say, John Barth, and the historical metafiction of, say, Robert Coover. And that's pretty much what this is. So there's some silly stuff here - the Russki scientist obsessed with yogurt, Howard Johnson buying a cryogenic freezer for his wife (to be stuck in a trailer and towed around by their limo) - and some boundaries-of-fiction-testing appropriations of personae - Howard Johnson, Norman Mailer, Fidel Castro, Gerald Ford - which combine into ten good stories that are experimental enough to be interesting (and worth reading) but not so experimental that they're difficult. (By the way, this was published a year before Coover's Public Burning so why Coover gets all the credit for being the first to use historical personages in his fiction I don't know.) The hijinx and the ease of reading, though, belie (as is also pretty typical of postmodernism) some dark themes, most prominent of which is an anxiety over the commercialization and commodification of all public space ahead of the ground of human relationships. Again and again, Apple builds stories around family members and friends whose familiality and friendship are mediated, and strained, by financial considerations and the desire for capital(ist) expansion. This compromises the terms upon which such relationships are conducted, adding a motivating incentive that totally scuttles any such relationship's a priori voluntary quality. From here you get the distanced, ironic, affectless postmodernism that today is criticized for being distant, ironic, and affectless. What this seems to lead to in TOoA is the tragic optimism of a culture beginning to look for authenticity and fulfillment and sincerity, expecting to find it in the next place they look, and finding disappointment. If you've already read Barth and Coover, give this a try.

[Rick Seery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Donald Barthelme knew what he was talking about when he spoke highly of The Oranging of America.

[Kallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had trouble, initially, getting into this particularly satirical view of corporate sensibility imposing its worldview on people's minds and lives. But Apple is brilliant, and this is all too true. He brings us his zany yet accurate view of Amurka through narrators not QUITE with the program, just bemusedly observing their fellow humans who've swallowed whole the notion that progress and business and money achieved by any means, in any form is a damn good Amurkan thing! I wonder if George Saunders would be an admirer? Anyway, will read more though it's hard to snuggle up to Apple characters.

[IndianaBeauty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was part of a mystery bundle from a local bookstore. The cover art grabbed my attention immediately I loved how corky the short stories were. This was the quick read that I needed during a snowy weekend.

[susmitha+02 · Rating 5 out of 5]

worth reading

[Hannah]

eclectic fun :)

[Lori Feldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each short story in this book is full of wit and humor... I used some of them for the short story group I run and the people couldn't get enough of Max Apple. I definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for some light reading .... humor... American nostalgia... and just some enjoyable moments that will make you think even after you've finished the story. The title story , Vegetable Love, The Yogurt of Vaserin Kefirovsky were our favorites. Noon was worth reading but I couldn't find any information from other readers to use during the short story group. Inside Norman Mailer wasn't enjoyable for most people to even finish reading. This collection has inspired me to explore other stories by Max Apple.

[Alan Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird group of short stories.
I read it because of the title story: The Oranging of America--which is about the founding and expansion of Howard Johnson's Restaurants. For those readers too young to remember, Howard Johnson's used to be ubiquitous along the highways. Everyone had the same menu; most had essentially the same layout. They did not offer great food, but you knew you wouldn't get bad food--plus they had all those great flavors of ice cream. They exploded during the 50's and 60's, and you have to keep in mind that back then there was no fast food, there was no Baskin and Robbins. Then you were basically relegated to mom and pop diners. That was fine in your own city--you knew which ones were good and which not--but it was very hit and miss once people started travelling the highways, stopping at distant towns, where they had no idea if a restaurant was good, or horrible. Howard Johnson's offered familiarity, and the safe knowledge that while you would never uncover a hidden gem, you also would never get a crappy meal.

This story purports to follow Mr. Johnson as he discovers new sites--driving the country in a stretch limo, with a driver and secretary, and a built in ice cream freezer! NOT BAD.

Sadly, the remaining stories in the collection never quite make it back to the Orange quality. Like the old HoJo restaurants, all we get guarantee of mediocrity, and that is not enough to hold my attention.

[Gary · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5 stars)

In this short story collection, Max Apple take popular icons and refracts their universes so that their stories become a little bent from the ones we know. Howard Johnson, the restaurant/hotel maven, gets caught up in cryogenics. The charm of Gerald Ford must be combined with the consumption of a friend's doughnuts for him to rise to power. A "Let's Make a Deal"-type game show raises its contestants to such frenzy that their momentum carries them through even when the host is shot.

It's an approach I like (Jim Shepard does the same thing). And when Max Apple originally wrote these stories, I imagine they were cutting edge. The problem with time, however, is that cutting edge ideas become cliches and appreciation for the originator easily gets lost (even despite ourselves). The "Let's Make a Deal" story, for instance, is a satire on the hypnotic effect of television which can subvert basic human decency and values. Apple wrote that story sometime before 1974. Since that time, the theme has been rehashed in so many ways. (The movie "Network," which was judged outrageous in its time, was released in 1976.)

But let us praise the original thinkers, and remember Max Apple (to whom, I would guess, Jim Shepard also owes a debt).

[Saski · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't really say I read this book, rather I had it read to me. I can't remember what caused this reversal of roles as it is usually me who reads aloud, but never mind.

Casting my mind back to where I was while listening I can say that it must have been between 1998 and 2005. I remember not being terribly impressed, and yet I still can recall the title story, probably because of my fascination with Howard Johnson's as a kid.

Now, flipping through to see if anything triggers a memory, I see that we quit two stories from the end. Maybe that says the most about what I thought about this collection.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of short stories seems to be most interested in the concept of "America" and weird characters that have become normal archetypes present-day. My favorite story was "Vegetable Love" about a man who meets a woman that is a new agey extreme vegetarian, and while they fall in love, he begins to lose an insane amount of weight, and then loses his sanity when she abruptly leaves him. There are Cuban baseball players, a professor who makes and lives off his own yogurt recipe, truckers, real estate agents, murderers, and even Howard Johnson.

[Ruby Hollyberry · Rating 1 out of 5]

I loved Roommates and I love Gootie, but these fictional stories are worthless. Apparently the guy cannot write fiction, or couldn't at the time of this collection's publication. Hey, lots of people write great memoirs and biographical stuff and terrible fiction. Natalie Goldberg and Anne Lamott come to mind immediately! I love their nonfiction but their fiction totally sucks. He can feel in good company.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

To preface: Apple taught me creative writing during college so I'm obviously going to be a bit biased. But besides the fact that some of the language in these stories are a bit dated and that he reads kind of like any white male author from this time period, his writing is still impeccable. Between the perfectly conceived details and the rhythm of words, I found all the elements of fantastic writing that he had gently tried to teach us. Really well done.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the craftsmanship of all these stories is superb, only half ("Noon," "My Real Estate," "The Yogurt of Vasirin Keforovsky") achieve any sort of emotional transcendence. More intriguing than challenging, The Oranging of America isn't a must-read but is a worthwhile one--especially for fans of modern short fiction.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I looooved this book in high school. It's a compilation of short stories. My favorite was about the man who turns vegetarian for his girlfried who subsequently leaves him.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

1981/2 diary: Neat stories - black hosed girls on roller skates, gas stations, real estate, rags-to-riches.

[wally · Rating 4 out of 5]

i really liked it!

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Half of these 10 stories are superb, and the rest are still worth reading. If you like the obtuseness of George Saunders, this book is recommended.

[Ken Moraff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A "must read" for anyone who likes odd, quirky historical novels. I loved this book.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really great short stories. Similar everyday-zany as Barthelme/Saunders/Foster-Wallace.