Apples Never Fall

“‘I’m just being cautious,’ said Stan defensively. ‘We don’t know anything about her. She could rob us blind in the night and we’d feel like real dickheads calling the police in the morning.’”

One of the novel’s more intriguing mysteries early on is Joy’s unexamined willingness to accept a total stranger into their home and to make her feel like family. Here, on the first night of her stay at their home, Stan—who’s more pragmatic and more paranoid than Joy—busily secures their electronic valuables, certain that Savannah is there to rob them. Ironically, in the end, Savannah gives rather than robs—she gives the family a new beginning.

“You know that theory: if you put a frog in water and keep slowly turning up the heat, it doesn’t jump out because it doesn’t realize it’s slowly being boiled to death.”

This bizarre parable, which Stan shares, encapsulates his family’s dilemma. Without seeing it, without realizing it, they’ve become locked in a toxic family unit. Over time, despite making one apparently smart decision after another and never abandoning the idea that they love and support each other, they manage to create a dysfunctional family in which all the members simmer in their own grudges. The threat of such toxic emotions is revealed in Stan’s parable and foreshadows the novel’s movement toward healing.

“God replied in the same aggrieved way Brooke’s mother answered the phone when her children left it too long without checking in: Hello, stranger.”

The Delaneys curiously lack religious structure—a benevolent deity that might undo their complex emotions through the reassurance that everything happens for a reason and that every mistake is under God’s direction. Brooke’s observation here reveals the distance and inaccessibility of that all-knowing God, suggesting that to undo its problems, the family is on its own.

“Accept nothing. Believe nothing. Check everything.”

The professional code of the detectives investigating Joy’s disappearance (and possible murder) sets up a worldview that the Delaneys eventually reject as they move toward their resolution. The police’s code precludes trust, making ironic any investment of faith in other fallible people—and guarantees emotional isolation and existential loneliness. It’s more in line with the absolute competitive credo of tennis that the Delaneys also reject. We’re in this together, the novel argues—all we have is each other.

“Here is one possible motive and here is another, because any marriage of that many years has multiple motives for murder. Every police officer and hairdresser knows that.”

That a husband of nearly 50 years automatically tops the list of his wife’s possible killers indicates the darkly ironic and unapologetically jaundiced contemporary culture’s view of love, marriage, and relationships. The more a person commits to a relationship, the more likely that relationship provides that person with reasons to kill the other person. In Joy’s Valentine’s Day re-commitment to her marriage—and in Stan’s wedding toast—the novel presents a counterargument that provides an uplifting ending.

“You couldn’t share the truth of your marriage with your adult children. They didn’t really want to know, even if they thought they did.”

Here, Joy is in full denial. Her disastrous commitment is to keep her unhappiness, doubts, and discontent over her marriage to herself. Bottled up, those feelings eventually implode in gestures of otherwise mystifying emotional excess. Joy later rejects this code of conduct, which reflects the tennis players’ code of tight-lipped grace under pressure, in the days after her return from the therapeutic retreat, where she glimpses how unhealthy silence, self-imposed isolation, and emotional withdrawal can be.

“She’d seen the moment it hit Stan: the realization that they should never have come, not like this, not as ordinary fans, as ordinary people because Stan had never really believed they were ordinary when it came to tennis.”

The perceived Delaney family curse is that each was talented in tennis but just not quite enough, so each of them in their own way is vulnerable to feeling that whatever life offers can’t make up for the celebrity, glory, and money that success might have brought them. Joy recalls when—during a vacation in Europe—she took Stan to tour the Wimbledon facility. Instead of being uplifting, however, the facility reminded Stan of what life denied him and revealed his discontent over having to live an ordinary life.

“What have I done wrong? [...] Then how is it that not a single one of you can maintain a long-term relationship? [...] So your dad and I weren’t perfect […] we weren’t that bad, were we? Are you punishing us for something? For what? For making you play tennis?”

Here, in an emotionally damaging Fathers’ Day showdown—when one by one the Delaney siblings reveal their relationship failures—Joy struggles to assign blame for the disastrous breakups. The irony of her anything-but-rhetorical questions reveals how much she still needs to learn, as she’s still compelled to define and then assign blame—to create a set of grudges to simplify failed relationships into tidy cause-and-effect blame games.

“It was an awful painting, but he missed it, just like he missed her questions, her perfume, her insistence he eat bananas (for the potassium, she was obsessed with potassium), her sneakers by the front door, her high-pitched sneezes.”

Amid the ruins of the Delaney siblings’ fractured relationships, Logan expresses the novel’s first inkling of a way to redemption, to reclaim the love that seemed too easy to destroy. This confession shows Logan’s true emotional depth, bucking his emotional profile, assumed to be shallow and noncommittal, and reveals an unexpected yearning to commit.

“If my dad got angry enough about something, he’d just walk away.”

Perceived by his wife and children as aggression, Stan’s habit of leaving at the moments of greatest emotional conflict is his strategy for maintaining his family’s structure. Fighting against his father’s habit of exploding (often in violence), Stan is determined not to do or say what can’t be unsaid or undone. It’s a quiet act not of desperation but of heroic commitment.

“So what are you saying? I don’t—”

Joy needs Savannah to be her life’s reboot. However, she now confronts undeniable evidence that Savannah is a phony (having just learned that her heart-wrenching front door confession about her boyfriend beating her was lifted nearly word for word from a television documentary). Joy resists accepting that reality. Still in flight from the truth, trying to pretend that Savannah is somehow her second chance to get motherhood right, Joy refuses to engage with reality. The last word of the quote reveals Joy’s stubborn resistance and how much healing she still must do.

“Soulmate…I don’t know about that. He was just a boy. He’s not perfect. I’m not perfect. When you’re young you get so worked up about things you think you could never forgive, like, I don’t know...”

While lunching with Savannah during their girls’ day out, Joy describes her relationship with Stan and dismisses the idea of a soulmate—someone perfectly aligned with another person’s expectations, hopes, and needs—as a silly and dangerous cliché. This revelation paves the way for Joy’s closing embrace of forgiveness and her determination to make her marriage work not because it’s perfect but because it’s not.

“You muddle along.”

Joy’s description of her nearly 50 years of marriage summarizes the novel’s difficult wisdom. Life doesn’t offer soul mates, marriage doesn’t breeze through life’s challenges, and families don’t follow carefully structured plans. Marriage, family, love, and ultimately death come with no instructions. Plans go awry, and dreams are frustrated. Over time, every decision becomes the right one, and every insight is its own kind of hard-earned life wisdom.

“I don’t think she’s dangerous…She’s just a really strange person.”

Savannah is strange, not as in weird but as in apart from, estranged from. Her presence keeps the novel from morphing into a sentimental tale of a family’s reclamation of each other. Savannah refuses to embrace the logic of forgiveness or the rewards of honesty, communication, and commitment. Her actions—trying to break up the Delaneys’ marriage, filing a false sexual harassment complaint, extorting money from Troy, showing up Amy with the brownies, even punishing her abusive mother—show how completely she remains an outsider, even up to the novel’s closing affirmations.

“‘Okay,’ she said, because simply looking into his clear brown eyes was as cleansing to her soul and calming to her heart rate as half an Atavan washed down with half a glass of wine.”

Much as Logan reveals his yearning for a second chance with Indira, Amy, who with her dozens of mental health diagnoses may be the most emotionally damaged of the siblings, indicates her willingness to move from a casual, friends-with-benefits relationship with Simon to a mature one that might give her a reason to stop self-medicating, futilely seeking refuge in drugs and alcohol.

“Savannah took a breath. Was it even possible to untangle the multitude of memories that had led to this particular moment in this bedroom?”

While Joy is at a therapeutic retreat, each of the Delaneys moves toward healing, undergoing a kind of emotional and psychological rehab. However, Savannah, who is emotionally and literally outside the family circle, doesn’t. Confronting her history with the Delaneys and the revelation of her nefarious vengeance scheme, Savannah resists the logic of expressing regret and its possibility of genuine healing. Instead, she sees her past as overwhelming.

“All the time she had a grenade in her pocket. Finally she threw it.”

Savannah weaponizes the past as well as words, clinging to the revelation she knows will secure what she hungered for: destroying a family she sees as the root of her life’s problems. After revealing that it was Joy who counseled her brother to leave Stan as his coach, Savannah, exiting the home she never belonged in, believes the dark energy of blame, regret, and rage will destroy the family. However, she underestimates the Delaneys.

“Joy didn’t know she was going to do it before she did it. She picked up the first of mother’s sneering china cats and threw it with the power of a first-serve against the wall, decapitating it cleanly.”

When Joy, for no apparent reason, unceremoniously throws two family heirlooms from Stan’s mother, shattering the Christmas decorations against the wall, reveals the toxic effect of holding in grudges and discontent. Stan just asked what he could do to help Joy—not repair her life but rather put a much-delayed lunch on the table. Given the magnitude of what Joy believes Stan did to throw her emotional life into turmoil, the offer seems insulting—small and insensitive. Joy’s anger and violence bring her no peace.

“She was a fighter. She was a winner. She was Joy Delaney. She would not give up on this marriage. She would take decisive, aggressive action today.”

After nearly six weeks of passive-aggressive silence in the Delaney home, Joy, on Valentine’s Day, begins to assert a counterstrategy. Drawing on her resilience as a tennis player, she tells herself that she’s no quitter, that her marriage and family are hers to reclaim. This epiphany is the beginning of her movement toward genuine forgiveness and her rediscovery of living without the burdens of the past to tap into the consolation of the family.

“At the age of seventy, he felt his wife’s flesh beneath his hands as his father’s colossal rage and humiliation, his pain and his hurt, ballooned within his chest and exploded beneath his eyes.”

Given that Joy’s murder is a comedic misunderstanding (the dog ate her note)—and Savannah’s claims of abuse by her boyfriend are a hoax—this moment, when Stan confronts Joy about Harry Haddad, is the closest the novel gets to violence. This disturbing sentence ends the chapter by asking whether Stan, feeling a genetic predisposition to anger and violence, will give in to his father’s rage—whether this apple will fall near its tree. The next chapter reveals that Stan walked away from this explosive anger, supporting the novel’s message that genetics need not determine destiny.

“But in life, love means everything. Love wins the match. I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I made the smartest decision of my life when I married Troy’s mother.”

Relentless police investigations have narrowed on Stan as Joy’s killer. He has watched each of his children struggle against acknowledging that, most likely, their father killed their mother. He has seen the neighbor’s damning video surveillance footage. After all that, Stan gives this wedding toast. Without irony and stone-cold sober, the perpetually taciturn Stan delivers an emotional affirmation of love despite the problems, heartaches, and failures.

“It was exhilarating. It would be terrifying. Her friends would be surprised too. It would be nice to be surprising for once. This would be a circuit breaker.”

Joy’s three-week departure isn’t a joyful event. However, her impulsive decision to leave with Savannah for an off-the-grid retreat marks a break with the joyless Joy she was for decades. It helps her recharge her emotions, reorder her priorities, and find the stability she needs.

“She had given up her dream of a professional tennis career with clear eyes. No one could have convinced her to do otherwise, even if she found a way to travel back through time and tap herself on the shoulder and ‘He’s just a boy.’”

Refreshed by her time away at the retreat, Joy realigns her reading of the past, ready to be a part, not apart. Giving something up framed her life narrative as an unrecognized sacrifice, casting her as a victim in her own story. Now she restores a balanced perception of how events in her life stemmed from her decisions, the repercussions of which she now accepts. That emotional and psychological empowerment restores joy to Joy.