Apples Never Fall

The opening chapters introduce the novel’s formal strategy: moving between the events leading up to Joy’s disappearance and the events of the three weeks after her disappearance. The novel is thus steeped in conflict. The chapters that chronicle the ripple effect of Savannah’s unexpected arrival at the Delaney home emerge as an emotionally charged study of a family under enormous stress from decades of simmering grudges and unexpressed hostilities. Meanwhile, the chapters that follow the detectives’ search for leads and their methodical excavation into the Delaneys’ lives emerge as a conventional police procedural—evidence being gathered, difficult questions being asked, and scenarios being crafted and tested that increasingly implicate the husband. Both timelines, in different ways, suggest solutions and the insight possible only with honest communication.

Joy’s night class at the local college sets the novel’s tone. On a whim, trying to fill the time during her retirement, Joy is taking a class on how to write a memoir. Joy tells herself that she isn’t interested in writing a memoir, that she attends the class only because a friend wants to take a shot at authoring her story. The stranger’s arrival on her doorstep provides the catalyst for Joy to do exactly what she tells herself she doesn’t want to do: review the ironies and agonies of her long life and make peace with her imperfect decisions.

Given Joy’s gradual revelation about the lengths to which she has gone to bury the pain and bitterness of her past, taking the class is itself a cry for help—a gesture that perhaps, now edging closer to death, Joy wants to try to unburden herself of a past that left her full of anger and regrets. She even proposes A Regretful Life as the title for her life story. Joy reveals how she’s haunted by her past—which, she admits, “kept bumping up against her present lately” (12). Close to 70, she admits that some days she feels the first foggy softness of dementia when she can’t recall her kids’ names or forgets what television show she and Stan are watching. The class reveals her need to define herself, to give “her life a theme” (10), she says, other than tennis. These opening chapters introduce a woman asserting that she won’t surrender to death, won’t go gently into that good night, without first coming to terms with who she is by examining who she was.

If the memoir motif introduces the premise of what becomes an investigation into the complicated emotional lives of the Delaney family, the introduction of each of the grown Delaney siblings reveals how they’ve come to terms with their past. In each case, the strategy is ineffectual. Despite an appearance of normality and a veneer of happiness, the kids struggle to find purpose and clarity in their lives given their shared burden: the oppressive weight of what could have been. They watch as their relationships collapse of their own irony. They grapple, like their mother, with regrets they need to exorcize, recriminations they need to air, and bitterness they need to move beyond. These opening chapters show how broken the Delaney children have become as they use different coping strategies that are more like evasion strategies.

Brooke runs a small homeopathic therapy clinic that offers troubled clients the chance to remedy their physical pains as well as their emotional worries through herbs, diet regimens, natural vitamins, and relaxation therapy sessions that massage out the troubles. Although it sounds tempting, as Brooke acknowledges that her clients never commit to the therapy and that her business is floundering. Suggesting the ineffectiveness of her approach to pain, Brooke herself experiences crippling migraines, which began in her childhood when Stan, aggravated by tensions in the home, simply walked out and stayed away for two days. She insists that her migraines can be remedied by prescription medication rather than confronting the anxiety over her father’s emotional volatility. The shallowness of a therapy program that eases pain rather than confronting its roots is suggested by how the previous renter of the office space was a Tarot card reader. Unsurprisingly, Brooke struggles to adjust to the recent departure of her husband of six years, which in her more self-pitying moments Brooke blames on her migraines: “Nobody wanted a wife with chronic migraines” (49).

Each of the other Delaney siblings has a strategy for handling the past that is as ineffectual as Brooke’s. Troy embraces material comforts, believing that pain can be blinged away with flashy displays of his accumulated wealth. In the adrenaline rush of reckless, high-risk investing he tries to find sufficient diversion from his insomnia and justification for the tacky affair that cost him his marriage. Logan, who teaches a subject about which he knows little and cares even less, self-medicates on studied indifference. He believes—even as a girlfriend he loves moves out and away—that life has no real purpose except to amuse him. Drifting is as ineffective as money and natural vitamins. Only Amy tries to address the siblings’ complex past. She has spent more than a decade in therapy, but counselors busily identified a long list of mental health conditions—labeling her with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), bipolar behavior with schizophrenic tendencies, emotionally unstable personality disorder (EUPD), and bipolar disorder. The sheer range of diagnoses indicates how ineffective counseling has been. Amy samples therapists and doctors, much as she’s paid to taste food samples to determine whether they’re too sweet or too salty. Alone and apart, she has become enamored with her own brokenness, content to pretend she’s addressing her issues, much as a taste tester pretends to eat a meal.