Notes and Spoilers for Liane Moriarty's Apples Never Fall
I finished reading my first book of the 2022: Apples Never Fall, by Liane Moriarty. I think I liked it. Enough to recommend it. It’s the kind of book you want to talk about with other people, at the very least to validate that it wasn’t a waste of time to read it.
I don’t like to write conventional “reviews” of books, as I don’t think of myself as a book critic. I barely have the diligence to be a book blogger. So be forewarned that there are spoilers ahead.
A screenshot of the Audible book cover from my phone. (I read it as an audiobook.)
My two go-to questions for writing about a book are simple:
Would I read it again?
Can I think of someone I’d recommend it to?
Would I read Apples Never Fall again?
I can’t think of any reason I would ever need to read this book again. That’s not to say I hated it. I enjoyed parts of it. It hooked me and kept me hooked. But no, I’ll never read this again.
Can I think of someone I’d recommend Apples Never Fall to?
This is a book where you have to be careful about who you recommend it to. Someone who enjoys conventional thrillers would probably end up disappointed. It’s a lot of petty drama. The twists and turns come not from the story itself, but from the narrative’s tendency to jump disorientingly through time and space. We’ll get a chapter from a cop’s perspective, jump back three months in the past to the point of view of the woman who has not yet gone missing, jump forward to a point of view of a hairdresser thinking about the missing woman, then back in time to the daughter of the missing woman, then forward in time to a person at the grocery store overhearing a conversation between the other daughter of the missing woman and someone on the other end of the cell phone.
In short, it’s exhausting and often repetitive. But I wanted to see what happened.
I didn’t understand some of the choices Moriarty made for how information was revealed. Somewhere in the middle of the book there’s a family dinner conflict, on Father’s Day, where the father takes the characters and the reader through the family’s entire history of tennis. This scene would’ve been much more interesting had we not already gotten most of this story through other forms of exposition throughout the novel. It felt as if she wrote that scene, loved it, but then decided to move it later in the novel and take most of the moments from it and distribute them earlier, making this “here’s the tennis history of our family” scene much less interesting.
Also, I wondered at times if this novel was written specifically as a way to capture the attention of tennis enthusiasts. I don’t mind if it was, but so much of it was dedicated to tennis—the sport is played or discussed at length in every chapter, as I remember—it seemed at times like a marketing ploy. “I want to write a book that every tennis player will feel compelled to read,” you can imagine the author saying.
So, who would I recommend it to? I think it’s a perfect book club book. Something that will dig up strong opinions. No group of people will universally love or hate this book. And it’s a page turner.
Make us ask: what happens next?
This book is a page turner for one simple reason: you always want to find out what happens next—or, the way Moriarty writes, you want to find out what the thing is that happened in the past that none of the characters have yet said aloud.
In this case, there are three what happens next moments that keep you turning the pages:
What happened to Joy, the missing mother?
Is Savanna, the obvious con artist, really a con artist?
Is Stan, the obvious killer, really the killer?
As I said at the top of this blog post, there are spoilers in here. Here they come.
The answers are:
What happened to Joy, the missing mother? She went off the grid, like she told everyone at the beginning of the book.
Is Savanna, the obvious con artist, really a con artist? Yes.
Is Stan, the obvious killer, really the killer? No. There is no killer, at least not involving the missing woman at the heart of the story.
You can tell the entire thing is building toward a denouement. There seems to be a rule in thrillers: if a character is obviously the killer, then it’s the one person you can guarantee isn’t the killer. And in the case of Apples Never Fall, it drifts into the same absurdist realm as the one other book I’ve read by her, Truly, Madly, Guilty, in that we find out the central event was not the murder the other characters are treating it as but, instead, something far more mundane.
Oh, but wait: in the final chapter we find out there is a murder victim, a woman locked in a room and starved to death, probably, by her con artist daughter. I appreciated this, as it validated that this book did have something interesting waiting at the end, even if the book continued for far too long after most of the storylines and mysteries were resolved. It gave us a surprise at the end that made up for not much happening during the dozen or so chapters leading up to it.
A few other small notes:
I think this is the first novel I’ve read to mention Google Analytics, in the same way that Purity by Jonathan Franzen was the first to mention SEO.
The book had a lot of mentions of search engines, come to think of it. I write down every literary mention of search engines and search engine optimization in a document on my computer that I have never done anything with.
Unfortunately, Moriarty seems to have no understanding of what a reverse image search in Google is, mistaking it for some kind of face-scanning database, based on one of the scenes in this. I think it would’ve been good if one of her editors caught that.
There are also mentions of Instagram engagement and writing a listicle for a health website. I think one of the characters could’ve really used some outside help with her marketing, as either she or Moriarty seemed to have a lot of confusion about how digital marketing operates, despite Moriarty’s best efforts there.
I learned the expression “my phone was flat” from this. Flat. That’s a cool way to say you’re phone was dead.
The extended metaphors involving apples were exhausting.
Oh, also this book becomes about the pandemic at the end. Whatever.
My last note—on Apples Never Fall versus The Undoing
For a time while reading this, I did wonder if this book might be going in the same direction as The Undoing, the HBO adaptation of You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Would it turn out that, yeah, the husband was the killer and shame on you for getting conned into thinking he wasn’t? The Undoing (and, I assume, its source material) broke the rule of thrillers I mentioned earlier: if a character is obviously the killer, then it’s the one person you can guarantee isn’t the killer.
If they cast these two for the inevitable television adaptation, I’ll watch it. (And it seems likely, as Kidman seems to be in every other Moriarty adaptation.)
The difference, of course, is that in that narrative we knew there was a dead woman and we knew who the chief suspect was. I do prefer The Undoing to this, as I think it’s a study in narcissism masked as a whodunit. Apples Never Fall was something else. A study of a family of frustrating adult children, their frustrating parents, and the con artist who duped all of them, in the guise of a Woman Went Missing thriller. With way too much tennis.