LIANE MORIARTY Apples Never Fall. Reviewed by Sally Nimon

The new novel from the author of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers delivers a family mystery told from multiple perspectives.

Apples Never Fall, the latest novel from New York Times bestselling author Liane Moriarty, opens with a mystery. We witness a seemingly abandoned bike being stolen by a skinny stranger in football shorts, then segue to the four adult children of the Delany family discussing the disappearance of their mother, Joy, over coffee and apple crumble in a Tuscan-style café.

The Delanys, it turns out, are no ordinary suburban family. Joy and Stan united in their youth over a shared love of tennis, and they have spent the majority of their lives running a coaching school and local club. When Joy reminisces in an early scene about how they got together, she realises it might never have happened if not for the sport: ‘They played their first match… She lost 6-4, 6-4, and then went right ahead and lost her virginity.’ And now, it seems, they are not set to enjoy an ordinary retirement either, with a mysterious knock at the door late one night revealing a bleeding and bedraggled stranger standing on their doorstep asking for help.

At its heart, this is a book about perspectives. Science has long known that the world we perceive around us is not the world as it really is – rather, it is an interpretation, a best guess made by our brain, compiled from the constant stream of information flooding in from our senses. Like the three blind men describing the elephant, all we can ever see is a small fraction of the whole, and small pieces can be misleading. No one knows this better than a detective, tasked with spending day after day trying to fit together the scattered debris of some past event, with no blueprint from which to assess what is relevant or coincidental.

Moriarty explores this idea by dividing her story into two distinct periods: before Joy’s disappearance, which is narrated directly by various members of the Delany family, and afterwards, where the various pieces come to the reader – and Detective Christina Khoury – via third parties: the waitress at the Tuscan café; the beautician administering a pedicure; the Uber driver overhearing one side of a phone conversation. All of these offer up snippets of what may prove to be vital clues, but are also filtered through the biases, opinions, moods and distractions of an unrelated person’s point of view. Like the detective, the reader is asked to try to sort through this maelstrom of data to come to some kind of conclusion.

And it is a maelstrom of data. Because this is a Liane Moriarty novel, Joy’s disappearance is not the only secret hiding in this story. The reality is that even the most outwardly perfect marriage can shield a multitude of sins, and Joy and Stan have been married for a very long time. And it’s not only the central characters who turn out to have things they wish to hide:

Troy shifted in his seat, kicked at an old Subway wrapper caught on the tip of his shoe from the floor of Logan’s car, and for no reason at all found himself considering what had happened in New York, even though he had not given his brain permission to consider it… The word ‘ulcerate’ seemed appropriate for the sensation he experienced at that moment: like a tiny cyst had burst and flooded his stomach with corrosive acid.

Without further information it is impossible to know whether Troy is experiencing an internal cringe from a moment of embarrassment, horror at some personal trauma, or has discovered a key clue that relates directly to the whereabouts of his mother. And that is another of the suburban spaces that Moriarty likes to inhabit – that a character can be suffering the most extreme and ongoing angst for months or even years for the most trivial – or serious – of reasons. We all have things that we like to keep private because they clash with our image of ourselves (e.g. we secretly love country and western music though we pretend to hate it) – or it could be because we are hiding something nastier. This is the dilemma that Narelle, Joy’s hairdresser, finds herself pondering one afternoon as she works in her salon:

She was Joy’s confidante and confessor, as bound by secrecy as a priest or lawyer, but if Joy missed her next appointment Narelle would go to the police and hand over thirty years of secrets. She’d tell them about the betrayals. The ones referred to obliquely and the ones discussed in frank detail. She’d give the police everything they needed to convict her husband … because any marriage of that many years has multiple motives for murder. Every police officer and hairdresser knows that.

Note here that Narelle has no direct evidence of Stan’s guilt. But that is rarely needed in the court of public opinion.

Apples Never Fall asks us to examine our own biases and prejudices. What should be the burden of proof when rumours start to rumble? What should we be prepared to believe, and what tests should we apply? What are the real-world consequences of our actions, intentional or not, and how long should we carry guilt for those consequences? While the issues at stake here may not be the grand schemes of nations, they are the cogs that make our daily lives turn around, and upon which marriages and relationships hinge.

What better subject to contemplate, as we sit here in lockdown, than the everyday dramas of ordinary lives?

Liane Moriarty Apples Never Fall Pan Macmillan 2021 PB 496pp $32.99

Sally Nimon once graduated from university with an Honours degree majoring in English literature and has hung around higher education ever since. She is also an avid reader and keen devourer of stories, whatever the genre.

You can buy Apples Never Fall from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.

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