SOURCE: Vannatta, Dennis. “Satiric Gestures in Max Apple's The Oranging of America.” Studies in Contemporary Satire 7 (spring 1980): 1–7.

In the following essay, Vannatta considers the satirical elements of The Oranging of America.

Satires on the banality of the American dream are by this time such literary commonplaces that they threaten to become triter than the cliches which they attack. Vietnam, inflation, and Nathanael West's A Cool Million have done in America quite well, thank you; why kick a tired old fellow when he's down? Yet on they come, novels such as Rob Swiggart's Little America (1977), at a time when the American dream is little more than an historical relic. Why then the striking critical and popular success of a first collection of short stories by Max Apple—stories which take on yet again the punch-drunk myth of America?

Reviewers of Apple's The Oranging of America were nearly unanimous in...