Apple, Max | Wayne Glausser (essay date 1983)
Wayne Glausser (essay date 1983)
SOURCE: Glausser, Wayne. “Spots of Meaning: Literary Allusions in Max Apple's ‘Vegetable Love.’” Studies in Short Fiction 20, no. 4 (1983): 255–63.
[In the below essay, Glausser examines Apple's use of literary allusions in the short story “Vegetable Love.”]
Max Apple's fiction doesn't seem at all dense or recondite. Reviewers have described his stories in The Oranging of America as “lighthearted satire,” “unpretentious,” even “giggle-ridden.”1 Apple's imagination thrives on materials offered by popular culture—Howard Johnson's, the Houston Astrodome, Let's Make a Deal, Ban Roll-On, and similar institutions and details of American low art. His characters often speak in what seems almost a pure language of cliché, using the tropes of real estate jargon, California buzz words, Time magazine style, and so on. Most readers come away from his work...
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