Much of Max Apple's new collection could have been published in Me Magazine. There's Max growing up in the 1950s with a Yiddish-speaking grandmother in Grand Rapids, deserting his family and region, holding onto kosher food (“The American Bakery,” “Blood Relatives,” “Stranger at the Table”). From the “Me and Mine” section we have three stories: Max exploring fatherhood with children Jessica and Sam at Girl Scout meetings, in a “Pizza Time” restaurant, and on a Dallas movie set. In the “My Arts” department are “The Four Apples,” a piece about stories for kids, and “An Offering,” a fictional prospectus advertising shares in “Max Apple, Inc.,” producer of “private fantasies.” The title story, about Max Apple's organs' declaring independence from him, would be perfect for Me's lead section: “My Body.”

Four fictions told by single or separated men of Apple's age and two narrated by women (all about personal success in love or business) extend the narcissistic atmosphere. Only two stories—“Walt and Will,” about the Disney brothers, and “Small Island Republics”—and two sketches, “Post-Modernism” and “The National Debt,” are fully set in the public world. This wide vision is the appeal of his first collection, The Oranging of America, and Zip: A Novel of the Left and the Right. Rapid-fire effects or the “zip” of jammed fictional combinations have been Apple's trademark and reason for his admitted “shortcuts”: using figures such as Castro, Mailer, or Howard Johnson as characters, playing with current events and brand names. Self is the shortcut of Free Agents, the quick starter for a story, but Apple doesn't push far enough into that self or send it wide enough to matter in most of these twenty pieces. The free agent owns himself only to sell himself: that's the feeling here.

The Max Apple of “American Bakery” solicits the reader (“Believe me, reader, I would like to know you”) and in “An Offering” promises to be “generous and friendly,” though not “ingratiating for profit.” For all his Apple absorption, he's a likable fellow, a little nostalgic and guilty, well intentioned and concerned with continuity—his family's past and kids' future. Many of his stories, though, seem assigned or machined for magazine space—“Have Apple do 3,000 words on eating kosher.” They are good first-person journalism but, with the exception of “Blood Relatives,” a story about Jews and blacks in Muskegon, mediocre art.

The non-Apple stories, though also sometimes perfunctory, are generally better: they imagine strangers and set them in a sharper popular culture. Entertainment is the prime subject that links the two sets of stories. Disney's invention of the rapid-moving cartoon in “Walt and Will,” the first story, engenders Disneyworld which, in the third story (“Small Island Republics”), effects a corporate merger with transistor-rich Taiwan. The empire of electronic entertainment invades the other stories, bringing the video revolution and adolescent-audience movies, softening up America for various rapid-turnover phenomena: dieting and running fads in “Carbo-Loading,” revolving door therapies in “The Eighth Day,” hulahoop entrepreneurship in “Business Talk,” and widespread free agency—the accelerated springing apart of sports teams, regional subcultures, and nuclear families. Walt's cartoon secret—“constant movement and sound”—becomes the Apple kids' warning: “Move it or lose us.”

While complaining about the cartooning of America, Free Agents too often shares complicity with it. “If you want long, go to art,” says Apple's spleen. But with twice as many stories here as in The Oranging of America it's speed Apple has chosen. Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and Leonard Michaels use some of the same shortcuts and have some of the same targets in Americaland, but entertaining as they are, they also have the power to disturb. Apple's Disney story, with its depressed Walt and ruthless Will, has this capacity, as does “Eskimo Love,” about a man who hooks (he thinks) his dead wife while ice-fishing. These disturbances come to be a welcome relief from self-irony, amusing fancy, and good-natured wit, the entertaining Apple.

“Making things up,” says the author, “is not very difficult: the difficulty is getting the sentences to sound exactly right.” Because the Apple who narrates often tags along behind a journalistic situation, and because his surrogate tellers don't have his linguistic skills, the crafted verbal texture of The Oranging of America is lost in Free Agents. Yes, beltway dwellers on the Southern Rim do speak in the plain, unmetaphorical style Apple gives them; but the writer to whom Apple is most frequently compared, Stanley Elkin, manages to give his similarly undistinguished agents jobs or interests or passions that create individual voices and separate textures. While “An Offering” and “Business Talk” do mock commercial jargon, and “Kitty Partners” uses some card-playing argot, too many of these pieces run together stylistically, yet another unfortunate result of the same self's dominance.

I'd like to see another novel from Max Apple. Though largely autobiographical and rather brief, Zip gathered together the talents of The Oranging of America. Free Agents—and perhaps the title admits it—disperses those talents, lets each sign up as a specialist for a story or two. If Apple can lay off speed and miniaturization, he won't have to be, in his own joke, “Max Apple, Inc., P.C.,” the Apple Personal Computer. He could be main-frame.