Apples Never Fall

Apples Never Fall is by genre a mystery—a woman who’s a mother of four and a wife of nearly 50 years, disappears without explanation on Valentine’s Day. The mystery genre presumes the drive to solution, a plotline in which piece-by-piece explanation occurs through the methodical processes of gathering clues that all lead to a pat—and in the end stunningly logical—solution. That genre demands a central, stable narrative voice—either the overarching omniscient author or a character who, like the reader, moves methodically through clues toward the reward of solution.

Apples Never Fall, however, has no such secure and stable narrative voice, no reassuring presence to help usher the reader through the slow revelation of answers. Instead, each chapter moves from the limited omniscience of one character to another: In one chapter, Joy dominates; in the next one, the Delaney siblings do; in another, one of the Delaneys’ nosy neighbors is the narrator, in the next one, the police detectives take over. This splintered narrative is further enhanced by chapters that shift between the three weeks after Joy’s disappearance (the chapters labeled “Now”) and the three months from Savannah’s appearance at the Delaney doorstep to the Valentine’s Day morning when Joy goes missing (the chapters labeled by date or month).

The splintered narrative frustrates the expectations of a conventional mystery but opens the novel into something far more involved: an exploration of the psyches of each character. In this formal structuring, the novel dispenses with the reassuring presence of a sympathetic first-person narrator and the reassuring anchorage of an over-arching authorial voice. The limited perspectives of the characters become an immediate presence—their emotional liabilities, their biases, their histories of grudges and discontent, and their hesitant struggle toward healing.

This approach suggests three levels of symbolic importance: First, by spreading out the narrative voice, the structure suggests that the Delaney family is a jointly created construct and thus must heal itself the same way it wounded itself: together. Second, the structure suggests the distribution of blame rather than the focused blame that, at least early on, defines (and disfigures) each character; instead, a family defines itself only collectively. Third, the structure suggests how characters must inevitably exist in two tenses simultaneously—that the past is never entirely the past and the present is never entirely free of the past. The narrative structure thus upends the expectations of a mystery and celebrates the limits of understanding that is key to the movement toward forgiveness that defines the Delaneys’ “happy ending”—after all, Joy was never murdered or even really missing; and we never know whether Savannah’s plan to kill her abusive mother succeeds.