Apples Never Fall

By Liane Moriarty, Henry Holt & Company, 2021, 472 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, January 20, 2022

It’s a little bit mystery, a little chick-lit, a wee bit literary fiction, and it’s 100 percent entertaining. That’s the Liane Moriarty formula, and it works again in “Apples Never Fall.”

Joy and Stan Delaney are retired empty nesters who sold their successful tennis academy, the place their four now-grown children learned to play. All of them were good enough to win locally and regionally, but none were good enough to win, say, Wimbledon. That doesn’t matter much; they’ve moved on.

Troy is a highly successful day trader who philandered away his marriage to the perfect Claire; Amy, in her thirties, still has roommates, crap jobs and struggles with her mental health; steady Logan’s relationship is faltering fast; and migraine-plagued, career-driven Brooke’s relationship with not-so-perfect Grant isn’t going so well either.

The perfectly married Stan and Joy aren’t so perfectly married, and they harbor a few secrets. Those come to light because Joy goes missing, and the police take a close look at Stan because, well, he’s the husband, isn’t he? Also missing is mysterious Savannah, who showed up bruised and bleeding on Stan and Joy’s doorstep one night and stayed.

The story is about the relationships and the Delaneys’ individual backstories that shaped them. The tennis metaphor is clear in one sentence: “Once you’ve hit a ball there’s no point watching to see where it’s going. You can’t change its flight path now. You have to think about your next move. Not what you should have done. What you do now.”

That theme resurfaces off the court. Describing Troy, for example, Moriarty writes: “No regrets. That was another of his trading rules. Never waste time thinking about what could have been.”

There are plenty of parallels throughout the book that remind us that we each approach competition and challenges differently; some of us attack the net, some play it safe from the baseline, some wear opponents down, some look for the impossible-to-make winning shot.

But the best character in the story doesn’t do any of those things. Amy is unpredictable, sometimes nearly incomprehensible, traits that frustrate her siblings but endear her to readers. She’s so unpredictable she sometimes surprises herself, and her self-awareness is great enough that she realizes her out-of-character actions are just a part of her character she hadn’t yet met. It’s the best fictional treatment of mental illness I’ve seen because it transcends stereotypes; Amy is not delusional or hallucinatory, she’s just wired a little differently than most of us. She knows she’s different and she’s annoyed by the way her sister and brothers tiptoe around her, expecting less of her than they should.

Moriarty even reveals ways that Amy’s defects are also her strengths, writing: “Amy, who was handling lockdown far better than her friends, because they had never experienced the permanent low-level sense of existential dread that Amy had been experiencing since she was eight years old.”

Amy even warns her love interest that she’s not a keeper, that she’ll dump him. As the narrator puts it: “She moved through therapists like she moved through boyfriends. She dumped both boyfriends and therapists when they offended her, enraged her, bored her. The boyfriends said she was a head case, a nut case, a drama queen, a psycho. The therapists said she had ADHD or OCD, depression or anxiety or most likely both, a nervous disorder, a mood disorder ….”

In other words, she doesn’t like it when people put her in a box and attach a label. That sentiment, if you pay enough attention to the character, is perfectly reasonable — there is no category that Amy fits into neatly, which is part of what makes her so charming. She represents all people who struggle with their mental health; there is no box.

Moriarty’s strength is characterization. We can see the world as her characters do, we can feel their struggles, we can root for them despite, or because of, their flaws. We get to see them from many angles, which gives us a chance to know them fully, to judge them by their motivations as much as their actions. In addition to exploring mental health, Moriarty makes us think critically about women’s roles, children’s drive to please their parents and how happy false fronts might be disguising long-simmering rage.

Joy, a successful tennis player in her own right, knows that watching to see where the ball is going is pointless, that living in the moment, that accepting one’s fate is the prudent path. In this scene, she’s remembering the one time she and Stan finally got to go to Wimbledon, only to leave the match early at Stan’s insistence:

“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.’”

That’s among the little things Joy lets go that accumulate and become big things later in the marriage until Joy’s approach becomes painfully stoic: “That was the secret of a happy marriage. Step away from the rage.”

Moriarty spends a lot of time on the idea that there’s no point to worrying about things you can’t change, that the only winning strategy is deciding what to do next.

She proposes that as a game plan for a winning marriage as well as a life strategy. It seems fitting for a family that plays a game in which every match starts at love and makes allowances for the faults as it goes along.