The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: Apples Never Fall by Lianne Moriarty
Details: Copyright 2021, Henry Holt & Company
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "From #1 New York Times bestselling author Liane Moriarty, comes a novel that looks at marriage, siblings, and how the people we love the most can hurt us the deepest.
The Delaney family love one another dearly—it’s just that sometimes they want to murder each other . . .
If your mother was missing, would you tell the police? Even if the most obvious suspect was your father?
This is the dilemma facing the four grown Delaney siblings.
The Delaneys are fixtures in their community. The parents, Stan and Joy, are the envy of all of their friends. They’re killers on the tennis court, and off it their chemistry is palpable. But after fifty years of marriage, they’ve finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. So why are Stan and Joy so miserable?
The four Delaney children— Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke— were tennis stars in their own right, yet as their father will tell you, none of them had what it took to go all the way. But that’s okay, now that they’re all successful grown-ups and there is the wonderful possibility of grandchildren on the horizon.
One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy’s door, bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend. The Delaneys are more than happy to give her the small kindness she sorely needs. If only that was all she wanted.
Later, when Joy goes missing, and Savannah is nowhere to be found, the police question the one person who remains: Stan. But for someone who claims to be innocent, he, like many spouses, seems to have a lot to hide. Two of the Delaney children think their father is innocent, two are not so sure—but as the two sides square off against each other in perhaps their biggest match ever, all of the Delaneys will start to reexamine their shared family history in a very new light."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I've talked about my fondness of Lianne Moriarty before and also my realization that she had two novels I hadn't read. I aimed to fix that and enjoyed Nine Perfect Strangers, and this is her most recent, written just last year.
How I Liked It: If my last literary outing on this stage left me pondering what make a good biography, this one left me wondering what makes good suspense.
But first, let's meet the family! The Delaneys are a tennis bunch. The parents, tiny energetic Joy in her late sixties and tall massive stoic Stan in his early seventies, are now retired and trying to fill the space of their lives (she with constant podcasts, he with television). A superstar champion former student, Henry Haddad, has just written a memoir and given that he switched coaches and thus dumped Stan before finding fame, there's a lot of unease in the Delaney family.
Not that there wouldn't be anyway, because of their children! There's Amy, in her late thirties and in a lifelong struggle with mental illness (Depression and anxiety) which has left her struggling with stability, moving in and out of her parents' house, and currently living with flatmates, including a nice young man in his late twenties, Simon Barrington. Then comes Logan, slightly younger and smarting after his girlfriend left him and doing a job he's not enthusiastic about, teaching business communications at the local community college. Then comes Troy, a hot shot trader who went away to college in America and made good, who is constantly trying to impress his family with his wealth, still competing even though he's alone, since he for no reason cheated on his wife with whom he's still very much in love, even though she's married to someone else now (and is trying to get pregnant). Lastly, there's late-twenties migraine-prone Brooke, separated from a stultifying ten year marriage to an egotistical blowhard and trying to keep up her physical therapy clinic.
Things meander along until one night a stranger turns up on the parents' doorstep with a story about fleeing a horrible boyfriend and they let this scruffy, bleeding stranger named Savannah inside.
From there, Savannah is the perfect guest, making food, caring for the parents, attending shopping trips, and in the process revealing a lot about the family until it finally comes to a head and many secrets (both recent and ancient) are revealed.
But we're actually doing double-time in this book! Told in both February of 2020 and the last quarter of 2019, Joy goes missing in February of 2020, and both timelines fill in and progress until we reach several revelations and several mysteries are solved, including those from decades past.
I noted in the last review of a Lianne Moriarty book that she seemed to be getting increasingly ambitious. Multiple points of view, a staple in her writing, was taken to a new level in her last book. In this one, she takes another of her staples, revealed secrets, and takes it beyond. If her last book showed she rose and more than met her own tough challenge, in this one there has to be some tennis metaphor I could use, because it's seriously staggeringly well-done. A book that is literally titled The Husband's Secret didn't have this much suspense and secrets (although I loved and love it anyway).
I was reminded of the best thriller I read last year, and one of the top fifteen I've read in my entire life, maybe (I've read a lot of thrillers), Gillian Flynn's Dark Places. In that book, the planting and payoff were utterly genius, as was the use of flashbacks. No detail was so small that it couldn't pay off later. Exquisitely plotted and twisting and fascinating, it's a book that demands you stay with it and shocks you over and over again along the way, rewarding you for paying attention.
This is a Lianne Moriarty book though, not a Gillian Flynn book (that's not impugning either author: both are excellent and both are very different from one another) and so there's plenty of the Moriarty charm along the way.
Again, small details have big payoff later, and while some may scoff at this level of detail as reaching, I thought it was delightful and satisfying how it all came together and the care with which Moriarty took in crafting the mysteries. Unlike any other Moriarty book that comes to mind (save for perhaps elements of The Last Anniversary, which had flashbacks to the distant past because they were plot-relevant), this is the first set with a specific timeline, and it shows. The Australian wildfires that horrified the world in early 2020 factor in to the book, as do the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. This doesn't feel forced or irrelevant, though, it feels like Moriarty writing a book in the 2020s.
I noted that her previous book was the first one post-superstardom and it showed in places (particularly given that one of the main characters was a writer) and this one thankfully contains no such fourth wall-breaking. So either she's made her peace with it or there are no writers in this particular cast, but I really hope it's the former.
Moriarty explores a lot of themes here that in the hands of lesser authors would go straight to trope, but instead ring with insight and authenticity. Marriage, sacrifice, family history and legacy, siblings, family secrets, competition, and family identity (and how that changes and how it doesn't) are all explored thoughtfully and in a way that makes them feel fresh and real, even though all of those subjects aren't new to literary exploration. Moriarty manages to capture the pure feelings at the heart of them all in an extremely revelatory and consistently engaging way.
I feel like I should note this book has a character who it turns out lies about domestic violence, and sexual harassment (as in, they make false accusations and allegations about domestic violence and sexual harassment).
That is statistically insignificant (false allegations of abuse, that is) in real life. It's vastly more likely that a victim of domestic abuse and/or sexual harassment or assault would keep quiet about their abuse (and even lie and claim they weren't abused) than the opposite. And every time a false allegation is depicted fictionally, it has to be done with a great amount of care on the part of the author.
And for the most part, Moriarty approaches this with care.
What makes good suspense? It's the author's attention to detail, meticulous pacing, and restraint, when needed. Moriarty delivers on all and with plenty of her signature charm, too, in the form of rich characterization, vast storylines, and (mostly!) tying up loose threads in an appealing but still mostly realistic way. In what's her most suspenseful book yet but with revealed secrets (especially slowly revealed secrets) being one of her signatures, Moriarty not only shows how to master a genre, but how to get even better over time.
Notable: If I complained before that the trope of "Twenty-Somethings Think Anyone Older Than Them are Ancient and Worthless and Gross" got really old and insufferable in Nine Perfect Strangers (which had built considerably on a passing insufferable attitude in Big Little Lies), unfortunately that's becoming something of a Moriarty staple too, based on this book, although it's a bit of a draw to say it's worse here than it is in her previous book. Given that the characters who get the brunt of it are in their thirties (and the remarks are spoken by twenty-somethings) in this book, though, it's an added edge of insufferable. I get that this is to show how ridiculously Young People talk and think, and I'm sure there are people who think and have thought this way, but honestly, it's not really mocking the mindset if numerous, diverse characters express it constantly. We see several main characters in the eyes of one-off characters (presumably as a way of describing the mains without too much exposition) and seemingly every time that's noted.
The blue-haired girl held up her hands, and the waitress saw the rumpled skin around her eyes and mouth and realized she wasn't young at all, she was just dressed young. She was a middle-aged person in disguise. From a distance, you'd guess twenty; from close up, you'd think maybe forty. It felt like a trick. (pg 5)
I get the idea, that someone dresses a certain way and you assume they're a certain age but look closer and they're actually not, but ew.
"Also, we're all a bit distracted. Our mother is missing."
"Oh no. That's...worrying?" The waitress couldn't quite work out how to react. They didn't seem that worried. These people were, like, all a lot older than her-- wouldn't their mother therefore be properly old? Like a little old lady? How did a little old lady go missing? Dementia? (pg 6)
Groan. Also, yikes?
Her dad had recently turned fifty, and it was cute the way he thought his opinions still had value. (pg 27)
The Uber driver saw his passenger smile faintly. She had supermodel legs in shorts, ratty dyed hair, multiple ear piercings, and simultaneously gave off a beachy vibe and an inner city vibe. She was old, maybe even late thirties, but he'd go there. (pgs 61 and 62)
I'm pretty sure this is mocking the male gaze, but I still have had more than enough of the male gaze.
The night Liz picked up Amy, they got chatting and Amy convinced her to park the car and join her for a drink in the club with her friends, which had been okay, but Amy's friends were so random. One of them was, like, sixty years old, literally sixty years old, and if Liz wanted to talk with sixty-year-olds she'd go visit her mother, thanks very much. (pg 241)
Liz, you have a hard life ahead of you and I for one am looking forward to it.
She felt a rush of love for her clueless little brother. First his cow of a fiancée breaks his heart, then his weird older flatmate gets her claws into him. You had to watch over those cougar types who dressed like twenty-somethings. Boys couldn't see the Botox. Although Liz was pretty sure Amy wouldn't have had Botox, she was too hippie and too new age, but she definitely dressed and acted younger than her wrinkles.
"Amy must be, what? Fifteen years older than you?"
"Twelve years older," he said. "Twelve years, three months, and twenty-four days." (pg 242)
This character being called a "cougar" is literally thirty-nine, which makes the guy twenty-seven (and if he's her little brother, Liz isn't that much younger than the woman she just impugned). Yes, people absolutely act like this all the time in real life and treat women and femmes to sexist, exacting standards (and it's a big double-standard), but this level of repetition in fiction, from several different characters is so, so tiring. I get that Moriarty's work always has an element of humor in it and this is no different (and it's presumably to laugh at these attitudes) but after awhile, it gets insufferable.
If you want to get really particular about it, you could go so far as to point out that these are attitudes we should be working to eradicate because they're toxic to everyone (particularly since adult life for twenty, thirty, and forty-somethings looks considerably different now than it did for our parents) which they are and they aren't something we should continue to portray as somehow relatable, whether we once thought that way or not, given how many people absolutely do still think that way and see nothing wrong with it.
I'm not venturing nor trying to venture into "a million darting eyes on the lookout for rule-breaking" and "the voice of the Almighty Internet booming from the sky" (as seen in writer Frances Welty's vision in Nine Perfect Strangers), honestly! I think the relation between fiction and reality is complex and complicated and I'm not accusing Moriarty of anything, I'm explaining why I don't care for this trope and find it tedious, and not really in line with the other Moriarty whimsy and humor.
She made it sound as if there were blindingly obvious ethical considerations that prevented them from being together, as if they were married politicians from opposing parties, not flatmates with a larger-than-conventional age gap. (pg 404)
I feel like not noting the fact that were it a man twelve years older than a twenty-seven-year-old woman, it would not be noted is, uh, something that should be noted.
To Moriarty's credit though, it's a huge breath of fresh air to have characters in their seventies (or very near, in Joy's case) have an active sex life and talk frankly about sex. Not even in an annoying, "I-know-we're-old" type of way, in a way no different from any other character, as it should be.
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The better-looking of the two men spoke. He wore a long-sleeved linen shirt rolled up to the elbows, shorts, and shoes without socks. He was in his early thirties, the waitress guessed, with a goatee and the low-level charismatic charm of a reality star or a real estate agent. (pg 4)
Nicely done, because that's a very specific image.
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Troy was a fool to think they could pay someone to come and do jobs around the house that their father had always done himself. Stan would find that demeaning, extravagant, unmanly. Logan had been in the car with his father once when they'd driven past a man in a suit standing on the side of the road casually scrolling through his phone while a roadside assistance guy was on his knees changing the tire on the man's Mercedes. Stan had been so offended by the sight he opened the window and roared, "Change your own tire, ya big fuckin' pussy!" Then he'd closed the window, grinned sheepishly, and said, "Don't tell your mother."
Logan wouldn't let another man change a tire for him, but Troy sure as hell would, and he'd enjoy it too. He'd amiably chat to the guy while he did it. The last time they all got together, for Amy's birthday, someone asked Troy what he'd done that day, and he said, without shame or embarrassment, "I had a pedicure." It turned out, to everyone's amazement, that the bloke got regular pedicures. (pg 71)
GET READY FOR SOME TOXIC MASCULINITY! And no, depicting it is not the same as endorsing it, particularly not when paired with some of Moriarty's other themes and choices (and choices of theme) as we'll see. I know people like this and you know people like this and it's incredibly sad there's still people like this, particularly in political office and writing and passing laws with these attitudes.
"Do you have a... partner?" asked Savannah.
"He's straight," said Logan. "Just likes to act camp."
"Do you?" said Savannah to Troy. She'd lifted her head, interested. "Like to act camp?"
"Apparently so," said Troy.
He didn't care when people thought he was gay. He kind of liked it. Kept everyone on their toes. He didn't do it on purpose. Or maybe he did. To differentiate himself from Logan, who was a "man's man." Logan thought there was only one way to be a man: their father's way. (pg 114)
Would a twenty or thirty something in Australia in 2019 (where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2017) really stumble over the world "boyfriend" or even "partner"? Also, the fact gay men can't be manly or all gay men act "camp" is... ooof. I get it's part of depicting this mindset (and the narrow approach to masculinity) and it's a complex thing, but Moriarty doesn't have the best track record with writing Queer issues.
"We can't pander to Amy's moods," said Stan. He spoke lightly, but Joy had spent fifty years forecasting his moods. She knew his patterns. She could see the tight clench of of his teeth in the line of his jaw. He'd decided he wanted to make a point of this, as if he were still a young father and this was a parenting decision he'd made, and as the man, the father, the head of the household, his word was law, as if there was still a possibility of shaping their children's behavior like they'd shaped their tennis, with the correct combination of rewards and punishments, and appropriate bedtimes, when in fact Joy had long ago come to the realization that all her children's personalities were pretty much set at birth.
Stan had always fought so hard against Amy's mental health issues. He thought he could make her stop and be normal through sheer force of will. "I just want her to be happy," he'd say, as if Joy didn't want the same. "We don't tell Brooke to stop having a headache," she said to him once, but he didn't get it.
She remembered how Stan used to admonish Amy to "Wrap it up!" when she was a little girl and took too long to get to the point of a rambling, senseless story, or "Slow it down!" when she became so deliriously excited her words ran together. Amy's face would fall, her mood would crash, and she'd abruptly stop talking, like a tap had been turned off.
"She sounded like a crazy person, I couldn't understand a word she said," Stan would say afterward, defensively, guiltily. Joy hadn't understood a word either, but she didn't care, she didn't try to make sense of it, she just enjoyed watching Amy's animated face as she talked her nonsense and enjoyed the fact she was happy for a change. (pgs 159 and 160)
Boy, did that make me cringe. The ableism that's particularly sexist as well is a particularly hideous kind and Moriarty depicts it well here.
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AMERICA IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY
One of the things I enjoy most about Moriarty's books is the fact they are so very Australian. Again, this makes it super weird that so far all screen adaptations I understand have completely removed that aspect of her books and both set them in America instead of Australia and made all the characters that were Australian American.
Anyway, Moriarty goes harder on America in this book and it's delightful.
When Logan was seventeen he turned down a tennis scholarship to an American university. He often wondered what his thinking had been. Was it because he knew his father didn't see an American scholarship as a valid path to success in tennis? "If you want to make a career of tennis, then focus on your tennis, not study." Or was it fear? A bit of social anxiety? He'd been an awkward teenager. He remembered thinking he wasn't enthusiastic enough for America. He spoke too slowly. He was too Australian. Too much like his dad. (pg 78)
She didn't know anyone with a housekeeper. That was for movie stars and Americans. (pg 248)
Today was Valentine's Day. A day that celebrated love. She and Stan had never really taken much notice of Valentine's Day. It was an American holiday, but every year there seemed to be more fuss about it: red roses and chocolates and teddy bears. (pg 377)
"I bet you were a cheerleader," her new [American] husband had said when they first met, and of course that wasn't a thing in Australia and Claire couldn't even do a cartwheel, but she'd let him categorize her as a sunny, sweet Aussie girl. (pg 392)
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A recurring theme in Moriarty's work is the thanklessness of domestic work and the work of domestic work. The fact "women's work" (whatever it might be, anything from housekeeping to child-raising to emotional labor) is so disparaged and ignored is explored in depth in this book.
They divorced over a plate. After he retired, her dad got into the habit of making himself a hummus and tomato sandwich every day at eleven a.m. Christina's mother suggested he rinse the plate and put it in the dishwasher. He refused. It somehow went against his principles. This went on for years until one day Christina's mother picked up the plate from the sink, threw it like a frisbee at her dad's head, and said, "I want a divorce. Her father was baffled and wounded. (Not physically wounded. He ducked.) [...]
"What about housework?" she asked Logan. "Any issues there?"
"Housework?" Logan blinked the way that men tended to blink when women brought up frivolous domestic issues in serious settings. It was just a plate, her father kept saying to Christina. He never understood what that plate represented: Disrespect. Disregard. Contempt.
"My mother did the housework," said Logan. "That was never an issue between them. It was a traditional marriage in that way. She's... of that generation."
"But didn't she help run the tennis school as well?"
Logan looked impatient. "I'm not saying it was fair."
She waited.
He said, "I'm telling you I never once saw them argue about housework." Was that an unconscious curl of his lip on the word housework? Did his eyes just flick over to Ethan for masculine support? Can you believe this chick? Or was she just projecting her own unconscious biases? (pg 90)
She'd dreamed of playing at Wimbledon too, and she'd dreamed of seeing one of her children or one of her students play at Wimbledon, and she'd dreamed, far more reasonably and feasibly, of one day being a spectator at Wimbledon, but her dreams didn't have the same ferocious entitlement as Stan's, because she was a woman, and women know that babies and husbands and sick parents can derail your dreams, at any moment they can drag you from your bed, they can forestall your career, they can lift you from your prized seat at Wimbledon from a match later described as "epic." (pg 184 and 185)
Also, why did she call it his office? When the children were little they always called it "Daddy's office" even though Joy was the one who handled all the business of the business.
Yet they all had to maintain the pretense that just because Stan was the man, whatever he was doing was automatically more important and deserved priority over any contribution from the little lady.
Well, fuck you, Stan. (pgs 375 and 376)
Why had her daughters seemed to suffer these invisible illnesses that no one seemed to understand?
"Might I suggest a firmer hand," said their family GP with a droll wag of his finger in Amy's face. And then: "Is this one a bit of a hypochondriac maybe? Baby of the family? Likes the attention?" He'd winked at Joy over the top of Brooke's pain-stricken, dead-white face. Another daughter's eyes begging Joy for relief she couldn't give.
It was easy when she took the boys to see him. Their illnesses were masculine, visible and curable: coughs and blocked noses, rashes and broken bones.
The GP didn't know what he didn't know about mental health and migraines. Even the specialists didn't seem to know much more, and they were even more expensive and patronizing. But why had Joy been so polite in the face of their ignorance? So meek and grateful? Thank you, Doctor. I'm sure you're right, Doctor. And then she'd get back in the car with a miserable daughter beside her, and the girls misinterpreted her frustration at her own impotence as anger at them, and they blamed themselves as she blamed herself. (pgs 378 and 379)
She'd never wanted his gratitude, just his acknowledgement. Just once. Because otherwise, what had been the point of her entire life? Of all those lamb chops she'd grilled? Of all that spaghetti Bolognese? My God, she despised spaghetti Bolognese. Night after night after night, plate after plate after plate. The laundry, the ironing, the mopping, the sweeping, the driving. She'd never resented it at the time, but now she resented every moment, every bloody lamb chop. (pg 384)
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Amy had never had a boyfriend hit her, although she'd had a couple who fucked her when she was too out of it to consent, but that was before consent got fashionable. Those kinds of incidents used to be considered "funny". Even "hilarious." The worse you felt, the louder you laughed. The laughter was necessary because it put you back in charge. You didn't remember, so you created a memory you hoped was the truth. Sometimes she kept dating a boy, temporarily convincing herself she loved him, just to keep the correct narrative on track. (pgs 138 and 139)
I had side-eyed "before consent got fashionable" but in context, it's clear the character is being glib about something horrific and that's how she's coping.
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Perhaps she'd accidentally "body-shamed." There were a lot of new rules for life, and she hadn't caught up on all of them. Her children, who had come into the world completely uncivilized and learned all their good manners from her, sometimes cried, "Mum! You can't say that!" She always laughed as if she didn't give two hoots, but in truth these inadvertent transgressions upset and embarrassed her. (pg 251)
"Did you try to make a joke? Because these days you have to be so careful--" (pg 307)
This crosses slightly into Frances Welty territory of "You can't say ANYTHING nowadays!" as though all social progress were just a silly youth fad invented in the past ten or fifteen years.
But given that these are characters from a generation that seemed to be the first to have childhood and teen years, the first to be parents, the first to age, and many other firsts that are absolutely not firsts (but the attention afforded to their large generation made it seem like they were), it somewhat makes sense the concept that they are also somehow the first to deal with social progress (as though their parents and grandparents didn't have terms and concepts and phrases that they considered dated and/or odious and that they were better without).
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"My brother has written a memoir," [she said]. "My father emailed it to me. The publishers are sending it out to anyone who is mentioned in the book for fact-checking." (pg 422)
I'm not sure if that's how memoirs work, but I'm not sure if that isn't how memoirs work.
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Joy could remember people in late January talking about some kind of dreadful virus creeping across the world, but she was too distracted by her crumbling marriage to take much notice, and besides, she never caught colds. She had an excellent immune system.
By the time she was "back on the grid" the world had spun off its axis, and it was hard not to feel personally responsible, as if the moment she stopped supervising, chaos was the consequence. It was just like when she took her eyes off Troy as a toddler: the mayhem and destruction that followed!
Suddenly everyone was "social distancing", especially around Stan and Joy, who were supposedly "elderly" and "at risk." When they went for a walk, younger people leaped elaborately out of the way, off footpaths and into gutters. (pg 433)
And there it is, COVID in fiction. This isn't the first but it's still chilling.
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Final Grade: A
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