Apples Never Fall

If Joy functions as the moral center of the Delaney clan, Stan is her nemesis, the counterargument. They’re much like two singles players with radically different styles. Joy is all about family, sacrifice, and the wisdom of communication and sympathy necessary to make a family work, while Stan is the opposite: Moody, distant, and taciturn, he clings to grudges and allows the injustices (large or small) of others to fester into a dark matrix of seething distrust—and, in turn, to trigger sharp anger and justify emotional distance, a selfishness that borders on the egomaniacal. His decision to get rid of the ugly carpet that Joy never liked measures the growth of his character—his evolution out of selfishness.

Initially, his brooding presence makes not only the police but also his own children accept, even assume, that he killed Joy (and the play on the word killjoy underscores Stan’s pettiness, emotional immaturity, simmering anger, and festering rage against a world he perceives—in his unexamined narcissism—to have it out for him). He regards his life with “colossal rage and humiliation, his pain and hurt,” which “balloon within his chest” (412). His obsession with Harry Haddad as his one chance to catapult into greatness reveals his discomforting sense of using people; after all, he wouldn’t be playing the championship matches; Harry Haddad would, and Stan would bask in that reflected aura.

Nothing better summarizes Stan’s character early on than his near-automatic reaction when he must confront increasingly difficult questions and he’s placed in a situation in which honesty and open communication promise only to reveal truths he believes better off ignored. In a novel that counsels communication, Stan dismisses communication, honesty, and responsibility. In difficult moments, Stan summarily departs. He walks away—a peculiar habit that suggests his unreliability as a character in a story that endorses openness and honesty as the only way a family can succeed. His redeeming quality, however, is his studied determination not to go the way of his father, who regularly beat his mother to assert domination and control. The only stable reality in Stan’s life is his love for Joy, a love that by his account was as close to love at first sight as possible: He calls Joy “the fair-haired tiny girl with the springy walk who had materialized like a miracle at that party all those years ago and smiled at him with those gleaming, combative eyes” (412). That sense of love alone gives Stan his chance at redemption and, when Joy returns, the renewal of their commitment to one another.

Sorting out what’s true about what Savannah confesses to the Delaney family about her troubled and troubling past is difficult. She enters the novel playing a part (an abused girlfriend desperately seeking the kindness of strangers) and sustains her presence by insinuating herself with obvious calculation into Stan and Joy’s home. All the while she’s waiting for the opportunity to strike at the family she blames in part (and entirely illogically) for the misery of her life and the emotional mess of her heart.

To demonize Savannah would be easy. She plots vengeance against a family whose only real crime was to object to a strange young girl prowling about their house 20 years earlier looking for a handout. She’s a pathological liar, a real “basket case” according to her last boyfriend, whom she frames as an abuser. She shakes down the wealthy Troy for “blackmail” money when she threatens to (falsely) accuse 70-year-old Stan of making inappropriate sexual advances to her when Joy is hospitalized. She files a bogus sexual harassment claim against Logan at the community college where he works. A calculating, predatory presence, Savannah is feral in her motivation, extreme in her sense of self-righteous vengeance, and unaware of the depth of her own amorality, her own twisted motivations.

Therefore, it’s unclear why the novel pulls back from completing the character of this unredeemable villain by not revealing whether Savannah kills her mother. The novel ends with Savannah landing at the Adelaide airport and pondering whether her wily mother has slipped out of the elaborate slow-motion death that Savannah devised for her before she left Adelaide months earlier. By Savannah’s claim, her mother emotionally and physically abused her—all in the name of molding her daughter into something she was manifestly not gifted to be: a world-class ballet dancer. Starved for most of her adolescence, she’s now obsessed with food. (She cooks for the Delaneys but seldom eats what she cooks; she keeps a strict account of all the calories she consumes in a day.) Much about Savannah suggests that she’s a broken, wounded adult, a victim of her mother’s cruel and abusive manipulations, and always living uneasily within the heavy penumbra of a hugely successful older brother. She gains the momentum of forgiveness during her three-week retreat with Joy, during which Savannah confesses to Joy much about the pain of her childhood. The end of her story thus creates mystery, suspends the reader between conveniently pat readings of Savannah’s character. She is yet isn’t a psychopath; she is yet isn’t the victim of a difficult and abusive childhood; she is yet isn’t the agent responsible for Joy’s emotional redemption.