Short Story Month - Guest Post - Richard Grayson II

Another great guest post from Richard Grayson!

One of my favorite short story collections of all time is Max Apple’s The Oranging of America (1976).  I can recall breathlessly reading the title story when it first appeared in January 1974 in American Review #19.  When I first began teaching college literature classes soon after that, I xeroxed the story and would teach it to the delight of my students.

As someone who experienced the orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s restaurants (mostly on the New Jersey Turnpike rest stops but there was a very old-fashioned one in Manhattan’s Theatre District which closed not that long ago), I had a familiarity with HJ, but Apple’s story – it also tickled me that a guy named Apple wrote a story and book with 'Oranging' in the title.  Now the joke of the title probably needs to be explained: The Greening of America was a trendy book of the time by Charles A. Reich which extolled the “Consciousness III” of the Sixties generation and was a bestseller as well as a hit in academia which I read in a Poli Sci course taught by Han Sungjoo, later South Korea’s foreign minister (to whom I sent one of my Xeroxes of “Oranging”).

In the title story, Apple presented what he’d later show in his the entire collection: a witty, gentle satire of American culture leavened by his affection for his quirky characters, many of whom are historical characters like the donut-loving Gerald Ford or the pugnacious Norman Mailer.  Howard Johnson is worshipped by his loyal secretary Mildred (so fastidious that she has never once vomited in her life) not merely as an entrepreneur whose roadside orange-roofed restaurants and motels standardized dining and lodging that we know take for granted; HJ is part of the long line of mythic American pioneers whose explorations and discoveries served Manifest Destiny and tamed a continent.  But I don’t think I can improve on Dennis Vannatta’s take in a 1980 article in Studies in Contemporary Satire:

“While Mildred sees HJ as a forging pioneer, Apple's imagery elevates him to the level of a god. When HJ contemplates his orange-dotted map of motel franchises, he "saw that it was good" (p. 5); and later he looks at the map once more, is inspired by the sight of franchiseless California, and "raised his arm and its shadow spread across the continent like a prophecy" (p. 11). Indeed, HJ and his kindred business titans are gods, each creating a nation in his own spiritual image.

 

The satire is felt in the distance between Apple's reverential tone and our recognition of the crass, mass-produced mediocrity represented by the Howard Johnsons, the MacDonalds, the Colonel Sanders, and the other franchise chains that scar America.  Yet at the same time that we smile at HJ running wild-eyed into a vacant field to mark the spot for a new motel with his urine, we feel an irrepressible spark of admiration for his vision and single-minded dedication.

 

But the story is not really HJ's after all. The true center of the story is his secretary, Mildred Bryce, and HJ's monomaniacal oranging of America is merely an amusing side issue. The conflict that most deeply engages us is Mildred's a conflict as old as love and death. Mildred's innocuously pleasant life as HJ's back-seat secretary confidante, and acolyte soon takes on the ancient odor of mortality when she feels recurrent stomach pains: "sign enough that something had begun and that something else would therefore necessarily end" (p. 7). To forestall the inevitable, Mildred joins a cryonic society: "Freezing her remains was the closest she could conjure of eternal life" (p. 15). But the necessity of remaining in Los Angeles so that at the moment of her death she can be plopped into a cryonic capsule conflicts with her desire to continue her travels with HJ. Though there is no hint of sexual liaison between the two, they exude a powerful sense of mutual devotion, admiration, and need.

 

Thus, Mildred's conflict is between life (the cryonic society's promise) and love (companionship with HJ until a certain death). The two appear mutually exclusive; not so to the ever-resourceful HJ. At the end, the two ride off into an orange sunset, pulling behind the limousine a U-haul containing Mildred's steel cryonic capsule surrounded by all the paraphernalia necessary for instant freezing upon death: a triumph of American technology, ingenuity, and love.”

 

Weirdly, the story always makes me choke up at the end and also when Howard Johnson and Mildred spend an afternoon with Robert Frost. 

Born and raised in Grand Rapids and a graduate of the University of Michigan, Apple spoke Yiddish before English, and I’ve always felt that had something to do with his writing being both imaginatively satirical and gently sorrowful.  Other stories in The Oranging of America that I love are “Patty-Cake, Patty-Cake…A Memoir,” told by then-President Gerald Ford’s talismanic donut-baker and “Inside Norman Mailer,” in which a would-be tyro novelist-narrator aspires to get into the ring with the big man himself, with lots of literary trash-talking and the same hapless results that befall the narrator of “Vegetable Love" after he endures after giving up meat to please a woman he wants to marry. 

In “The Yogurt of Vasirin Kefirovsky,” a noted astronomer wants to change the way people eat, ending the necessity for teeth, and the story "Noon," about a really dangerous game show, prefigures Vanna White, only in maniacal form.

Apple’s two later story collections, Free Agents and The Jew of Home Depot, also contain comic, good-hearted tales of American archetypes and losers.  Ann Hodgman in the New York Times Book Review praised “Apple's knack for creating memorable little fictional worlds…Many of Apple's stories are heartbreaking, but there's hardly a page that doesn't yield a smile at one line or another.”  Newsday said that as a humorist, Apple should be as heralded as Calvin Trillin or Garrison Keillor.  I hope those who’ve never heard of Max Apple check out his wildly imaginative and funny stories.