SOURCE: Wilde, Alan. “Dayanu: Max Apple and the Ethics of Sufficiency.” In Middle Grounds: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction, pp. 131–58. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Wilde traces Apple's stylistic development.

The conventional tags that generally fill out the titles of short-story collections—“five stories,” “eight stories,” sometimes the spare and humble “stories,” and, most often, as in the case of The Oranging of America, the serviceable, formulaic “and other stories”—all leave open the question of what, if any, unifying principle binds together a volume's title story and its remaining, otherwise unspecified contents. Picking up books with names like Dubliners, Winesburg, Ohio, Tropismes, City Life, or Fizzles, on the other hand, the reader is led to expect a more absolute and demonstrable coherence, as one is when approaching Max Apple's second and larger collection, Free Agents, which falls at least nominally into this category...