SOURCE: Betsky, Celia. Review of The Oranging of America and Other Stories, by Max Apple. Saturday Review 4 (22 January 1977): 40.

In the following review of The Oranging of America, Betsky discusses Apple's use of humor.

Max Apple writes fiction the way Claes Oldenburg makes sculptures. His short stories in The Oranging of America take American obsessions and fads, myths and habits, and explode them into ingenious symbols with a life all their own. His comic intelligence either magnifies desires like the need to own a home (“My Real Estate”) into tangible absurdities or reduces pressing ideological issues to metaphorical jokes, as when Fidel Castro and an American “capitalist” agent compete in a baseball game for the loyalties of a Cuban ex-ballplayer turned revolutionary.

Life is not only a game, Apple's stories seem to say, but a game show (“Noon” for instance, is based on television's Let's Make a Deal). They...