SOURCE: Bellamy, Joe David. “Max Apple.” In Literary Luxuries: American Writing at the End of the Millennium, pp. 179–182. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Bellamy surveys the stories in The Oranging of America.

The spirit that made America what it is today is still operative, according to Max Apple in his remarkable debut, The Oranging of America. That peculiar combination of resourcefulness, fanaticism, greed, and dumb luck is all around us, just waiting to launch another multibillion-dollar franchise. This spirit is embodied for Apple during a fill-up at the world's largest gas station, in a real-estate woman's yen to transform the Astrodome into a climate-controlled subdivision for middle-income bungalows, or in an elderly scientist's obsession with the health-giving properties of yogurt that leads him to hypothesize a yogurt-based theory of history.

Most appealingly, it turns up in the fictionalized figure of Howard Johnson, the restaurant...