The mundane -- with anachronistic stumbles

IT’S been 20 years since Max Apple’s last work of fiction and more than a decade since his memoir of life with his grandfather, “Roommates,” became a national hit, spawning the movie of the same name starring Peter Falk. In the intervening years, Apple has kept a relatively low profile; his short fiction periodically shows up in magazines and journals, and he teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

For a writer hailed as one of the finest satirists of the late 1970s for his iconic collection, “The Oranging of America,” Apple’s absence from literary circles has sadly made his fiction less and less known, to the point that he’s more often used in comparison than actually read.

Apple made his name skewering pop culture and finding relevance in the mundane and the absurd of Jewish life.

The aims of his new collection, “The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories,” are no different in that regard, but significant anachronistic stumbles ensue.

The narrator of “Stepdaughters” is a middle-aged stepfather to Stephanie, a high school shot-putting phenom who dresses her room with a huge silk screen of her dead father, Harold, and later with a “more ragged, menacing” image that further confounds the man:

“ ‘You like him?’ Steph asked.

“I didn’t know how to answer.

“ ‘I’m not sure I do,’ she said, ‘but he was on sale for $7.98, so it was no big deal. Most of the Steps are crazy about him.’

“The Steps are the Stepdaughters, a club Stephanie founded. He is Mick Jagger. . . . After that I bought a wall-hanging, too, of a group called Genesis. I told her I hoped it would signify a beginning for the three of us.’ ” All of this would make for a touching exchange in a story about the shifting of nuclear families and the culture of the mid-1980s, which is when the story first appeared in Esquire. Its mentions of “Jane Fonda’s Workout Book,” the size of East Germany’s female athletes and asides about the madness of John Hinckley Jr. place it into a particular context. But when the narrator tries to assuage Helen, Steph’s mother, about her daughter’s sudden spurt in size and bulk by telling her it is all likely a passing fad, Helen says, “ ‘A year from now . . . I could be dead and Bin Laden could be ruling the world.’ ”

It’s a hiccup that wouldn’t otherwise ruin a story, provided it came to a satisfying conclusion, both emotionally and structurally, but as with many of Apple’s tales here, it stops with such a simple epiphany (essentially, to love Stephanie and support her desire to put the shot) that it leaves the reader grasping for the very reason we’ve gone on the journey at all.

When Apple does approach present culture directly, his take tends to be overly straightforward. In “Yao’s Chick,” 26-year-old Li En, a former gymnast who has grown too tall and subsequently fallen out of favor in her traditional Chinese American family, falls in love with Yao Ming, the imposing Chinese center of the Houston Rockets, and determines she will win his favor and finally land a husband. Instead, Li witnesses a slice of a more probable future when she sees the Rockets’ halftime entertainment, a mascot named Turbo, leaping and flipping through the air to dunk the basketball and is entranced. Li drifts from her obsession with Yao to her affinity for Turbo immediately and, again, the story concludes without conflict, without true consequence for the folly of her belief.

“Proton Decay,” a story about a pharmacy owner who falls in love with a physicist he sees on “60 Minutes,” suffers the same fate. The narrator of the story dives headlong into fixation, even hiring the physicist to speak at a pharmacists’ convention just so he can meet her but not before he sends the woman a letter detailing his great love for her. It’s a slide into mania that we don’t fully witness, however. That the woman responds in kind, for no apparent reason, and the story ends in true love (or at least the suggestion of true love) is troubling. There’s nothing wrong with a happy ending, provided the writer has crafted a world where sweetness isn’t tied into bows but where happiness is a relative concern, just like sadness. But it’s the finality of such things in many of Apple’s stories that makes them read like blunt objects when they could just as easily suggest a life elongated by ellipses of emotion.

And yet Apple is still capable of dialing into emotions that ring of truth when he wants to, particularly in two stories concerning dementia, “Strawberry Shortcake” and “Adventures in Dementia,” and in the title piece, which concerns a rabbi and his family who move into a house owned by a wealthy old Jewish man who is dying.

As the old man unexpectedly hangs on, the rabbi’s son, Chaim, becomes fixated on a young woman named Laura who, each night, has sex with the fraternity boy next door. Filled with turmoil of both faith and flesh, Chaim learns where Laura works -- Home Depot -- and gets a job there to be closer to her, although he never stops his midnight vigil. “The coveting, that was the violation, worse than the looking and even more impossible to stop,” Chaim thinks, but it’s already too late. The rest of the family is also tortured by the promise and the deception of love, so that when the story (and the book) ends, the reader is delivered a world in ruin, where every action has found its consequence, where every character has met an end that augurs an unpredictable future. If only the rest of Apple’s stories had taken such chances.

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Tod Goldberg is the author, most recently, of the short-story collection “Simplify.”