The Propheteers

This novel is a wonderfully luminous satire of American corporate shenanigans. The best-drawn satiric targets in this gallery are Howard Johnson, ice cream and hotel entrepreneur, and good old Uncle Walt Disney himself. This is not the Walt of "Hollywood's Dark Prince" to be sure, but it probably isn't the vision that the company that bears his name would necessarily want you to have, either. Walt comes off as an aloof visionary, the sort of absent-minded, kind-hearted genius that you might expect to find wandering about town, head in the air to admire the architecture while falling into open manholes. Leave it to his brother Roy (renamed Will here) to be the arch-capitalist pragmatist. Howard Johnson, on the other hand, is a visionary capitalist god, brimming with Zen energy. When Johnson surveys a map of the U.S., stippled with little orange dots to denote up-and-running HoJo Inns, and declares that "it is good", you might be tempted to accuse Apple of blasphemy, but you'd be missing the point. The novel is rife with satire on the American way, always witty, and never bitter. The prose is elegant and imagistic throughout, conjuring for the reader slick visions of contemporary Americana. The final image is among the most grotesque you're likely to find this side of Stephen King, but there's an awesome, glowing wonder about it that makes it unforgettable and surprisingly appropriate for a work that works very hard to avoid muckraking satire by holding onto a consistently light tone. It compares favorably with the best of Horace, the noble Roman whose name is synonymous with this brand of gentle satire, and it's a shame that Apple's works are not widely known. It's probably good for him, however, because it's doubtful Disney would have paid him a single cent for scripting the movie version of "Roommates" if they knew what Max had done with their founder! Highly recommended!