SOURCE: Wilde, Alan. “A Map of Suspensiveness: Irony in the Postmodern Age.” In Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination, pp. 161–65. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.

In the following excerpt, Wilde explores Apple's utilization of irony and symbolism in creating postmodern fiction.

Max Apple at his best, as in the title story of The Oranging of America and the slightly later “Disneyad,” is all chamber music. Equally postmodern, Apple's prose is more intimate, its tone, at once affectionate and aware, more understand—full of a significative doubt directed at the contemporary world of goods and services and at the founding fathers of that world, chief among them the remarkable and comic Howard Johnson. In part God—“HJ raised his right arm and its shadow spread across the continent like a prophecy”; “he contemplated the map [with its dots signifying existing and projected ‘HJ houses’] and...