Delightfully Rearranging Our World

...We could build a religion, a college, an atom-powered village—anything we want...

...This, inevitably, led to his epiphany of the Sistine ceiling as an animated cartoon for Sunday Schools...

...Possibly not in the mood either for whimsy or for learning more than I wanted to know about the motel and ice-cream business, I gave up after a couple of pages...

...He finds evident joy in his skill at making the bigwigs his fictional characters...

...The classic definitions will have to be rewritten...

...Here Apple describes, with passion and good humor, what it is like to belong to "the minority of the minority" and go through life forever obliged to explain what it means to keep kosher...

...In the gee-whiz style of a PR-inspired newspaper feature, its title story purported to tell how a man named Howard Johnson came to fulfill his American Dream from the back of a 1964 Cadillac limousine equipped with a battery-operated ice-cream freezer that held at least 18 flavors at all times, although Mr...

...My mistake...

...contributor, "New Yorker," "Punch," "Commentary" Over a year ago, knowing nothing about Max Apple, I began to read a book of his called, rather facetiously, The Oranging of America...

...As I discovered upon being moved to pick it up again when I finished this new collection, Oranging is also a cheerful mixture of Apple's deceptively bland sense of fantasy and airy humor—a humor free of malice, aggression, or sly nudges to share a laugh at another's expense...

...But they brighten quickly at the thought of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, because "you can direct-dial Tripoli," and rumor has it that the man who "has been lying low since Billy Carter" accepts collect calls...

...Then, as imperceptibly as an airliner retracting its wheels, it drops its horizon and soars into a most un-Disney like flight of fancy on how a diffident young genius-tobe hit on the original idea for his billion-dollar mouse...

...Much of Apple's writing encroaches on the private lives of the famous: Disney, Mailer, Velikovsky, Einstein...

...Naturally, she refuses to accept that he is blocked from reliving his birth trauma because he can't regress past the trauma of his eighth-day circumcision...

...Glumly mulling over possible investors in the troubled enterprise, the producers sincerely mourn the loss of the Shah and his money...

...The whimsical, amoral and immature Hollywood types paraded here have for me a practically tape-recorded reality...

...It came to him, you see, while he was watching an ant farm in constant motion...

...He is capable in these of putting you in mind of a Bellow protagonist recalling his impossible women...

...I'm not good at real life," admits the director, evoking, if not Altman, then surely Francis Coppola or Steven Spielberg...

...They may, on occasion, have "noticeable armpits," or "teeth like lightning rods," but they do not, a la Bellow's, "eat green salads and drink human blood...

...Other delightful rearrangements of our world occur in "Small Island Republics," where a brilliant young Japanese* American lobbyist rides to the rescue of an abandoned, stagnating and forgotten Taiwan—by leasing it to Disneyland...

...The solution is arrived at with such perfect logic, one suspects it could not fail to earn Ronald Reagan's wholehearted approbation...

...The conventional wisdom is that short story collections do not sell...

...Further on, Apple records for us the conversation in which the true visionary, head-on-his-shoulders brother Will, has to virtually twist Walt's arm to get the go-ahead to build Disney World...

...In "The Eighth Day," a tale with a little more edge, we meet an amiably passive man involved with a woman in the throes of Primal Therapy...

...Nevertheless, the warm critical reception Free Agents has been receiving, and Max Apple's recent appearances in Esquire, lead me to hope it may still be enough for a writer to offer us an altogether new way of looking at our world while making us laugh out loud with pleasure...

...We'll be the Statue of Liberty for another planet...

...Yet with the possible exception of "Inside Norman Mailer" in The Oranging of America, his intent seems to me not so much satire as appropriation...

...More kids know the Mouse than Jesus Christ," Will argues...

...Walt and Will," the first story in Free Agents, opens in the Johnson saga's upbeat, almost plodding expository manner...

...Readers— like johns prudently disinclined to fall in love with a hooker—are perceived as reluctant to invest a whole lot of emotion in an experience that is over so quickly...

...Apple's more overtly autobiographical stories, if equally sweet-natured, seem to me somewhat less magical...

...Child's Play," about movie-making in Dallas, reports on a production at times reminiscent of Robert Altman's Streamers...

...The Apple women, though, even the lady who actually drove him to seek out the bewildered performer of his circumcision, are less formidable, less toxic, less mad...

...I am willing to concede that the author's transcript of the brothers' exchange may not be historically accurate...

...You could confuse it with the sort of authorized biography the Disney management might entrust to a tame, starry-eyed academic...

...Of the personal pieces, the one I have been pushing into friends' faces is "Stranger at the Table...

...Thus in Free Agents he doesn't even bother to include one of those smarmy disavowals of "any similarities to persons living or dead...

...But I have no difficulty believing— having myself often foolishly resisted arm-twistings by similarly inspired dreamers—that this is the kind of talk, the kind of icy-shrewd, childlike leap of faith that gave us the Empire of the Mouse—whose recent 50th birthday, incidentally, was marred a bit by a 16-point decline in the price of its shares...

...Johnson ate only vanilla...

...Walt does, however, resist Will's demand that he equip Minnie Mouse with secondary sexual characteristics: "Mouseness, not humanity, was the heart of this creation...