A 1970s Love Story

Jeff Zentner’s new novel Love, Like Apples, transports us to 1970s New York City, where Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, George Lucas’ Star Wars, and Jim Henson’s Muppets are among the influences in the air.

It’s a tale told by a onetime puppeteer named Tiller Loomis, who grew up in the fictional East Tennessee town of Sawyer, “not far from Dolly Parton’s birthplace.” (Sawyer is also the initial setting of Zentner’s critically praised 2021 YA novel, In the Wild Light.) The story is framed as an interview with Tiller, now in his 70s, for a documentary about a Children’s Television Workshop project called Imagine Nation, conceived for a post-Sesame Street teenage audience. Conveniently for the novel’s plot, the documentary director wants to know everything about Tiller’s life, from his early years through his experience with the television show and its aftermath.

Tiller’s family in Tennessee owned a small apple orchard which ran on the hard labor provided by him and his older brother Smith, along with their father. Tiller’s mother died when he was born, and his bitter father devolved into alcoholism, leaving Smith to care for the younger sibling. The older boy is a brilliant influence on Tiller, “a Mary Oliver Christian, not a Jerry Falwell Christian,” whose philosophy about kindness and love of nature and its creatures was distilled in his advice that, “You choose who you are.” He’s the source of Tiller’s understanding that “love, like apples, is a sweetness that emerges from improbable circumstances.” But Smith is drafted for the Vietnam War, and within months of his departure, Tiller and his father get the official visit from two soldiers who report that Smith is gone.

Tiller had a treasured gift from his brother, a dancing wooden figure on a stick called a limberjack. The puppet and Smith’s credo inspire his unlikely journey from Appalachian farm to metropolitan television studio — yes, the apple orchard to the Big Apple — where he joins a band of unconventional characters working on a show for PBS built around puppets.

On his arrival at the studio, the novel takes a hard turn to romance as Tiller falls in love at first sight with one of his colleagues, a beautiful young woman from Pennsylvania coal country. His rival for her attention is Imagine Nation’s head writer, a wealthy and sarcastic Boston Brahmin. There are reflections on the subtleties of puppet-making and a cast of intriguing side characters, but Tiller’s unsteady yet unswerving pursuit of Julie is the spine of the story.

As an older man explaining his history, Tiller introduces himself as a poet and woodworker before describing his past as a farmer, puppeteer, and theater set builder. Zentner has a similar professional versatility. A Nashville lawyer and a musician, Zentner has written several YA novels including his award-winning 2016 debut, The Serpent King, and an adult novel, Colton Gentry’s Third Act.

Zentner’s wit and inventive imagery give ballast to this emotional love story. The best restaurant in Tiller’s hometown is “a tragic steakhouse.” A friend in the town “smoked like his lungs could only absorb oxygen if tobacco pulled back a velvet rope.” When Smith is boarding the bus for his induction, Tiller “clutched him like he’d been lowered to me on a cable to fish me out of a ravine.” 

And when he makes the transition from Appalachia to the ‘70s-era grime and decay of New York City, Tiller explains why it’s easy: “I’d been up to my elbow in our neighbors’ livestock’s birth canals before. I’d used outhouses and seen the aftermath of thresher accidents. Squeamishness was never a luxury I’d had.”