Legends the Propheteers

By Paul Gray

The year is 1964. At her mansion in Orlando, Margery Post, the immensely rich only child of the man who invented Grape-Nuts, asks a friend, "Milly, if you had one place on earth where you finally felt comfortable, would you let the Disneys build a park in your backyard?" Milly happens to be a trusted associate of the ice cream and motel magnate Howard Johnson, who is also in Orlando, hoping to stop the Disneys. "I think we could take them," he tells her. "I think we can move into vacations."

Thus is joined a fictional battle involving real-life combatants. But Author Max Apple's second novel does not try to generate much suspense over the outcome. Even in the wackiest narrative, the existence of Disney World would be difficult to ignore or disprove. Instead, The Propheteers uses a supposed struggle in Orlando as a farfetched excuse to noodle imaginatively and affectionately with some American myths. What, specifically, might it feel like to be someone whose private, obsessive vision is miraculously rewarded with fortune and fame?

That of course happened to Walt Disney, Howard Johnson and Margery's father, C.W. Post. Apple invents their stories through a series of flashbacks and vignettes. Here is Post, a zealous vegetarian, who sees dry cereal not as a means to get rich but as a way to "save all the animals on the face of the earth." There is Johnson, who spends much of each year being chauffeured across America, picking sites for future motels through some instinctive knowledge of where future tired travelers will want to be treated to the comforts of home. Among the three dreamers, Disney seems the least fulfilled, his interest in pure animation chilled by his brother's insistence that Mickey Mouse stand up and act like a human.

Near the end, Margery meets her friend Johnson and her enemy Disney in an Orlando drugstore, and they all have lunch: "It was an odd coincidence, she realized, that she and Walt Disney and Howard Johnson were human beings." It will not seem odd to readers of The Propheteers that legends can live and breathe in a gentle fable as fabulous as the truth.