Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
I remember the summer of 2017 with a peculiar clarity. Not for the political upheavals or any personal milestones, but for the ubiquity of a single book cover. On a sun-bleached beach in the Cyclades, a German tourist was reading Big Little Lies. On the Stansted Express, a commuter was engrossed in it. In a Waterstones window on a drizzly Tuesday, a mountain of them stood sentinel. Liane Moriarty had achieved that rare form of cultural saturation that transforms an author into a brand, and a book into an essential accessory for a certain kind of life.
Her latest offering to this global congregation, Apples Never Fall, demonstrates that the Australian author’s grip has not loosened. It has, if anything, become more refined. All the familiar ingredients are present and correct: the sun-dappled Australian setting, a sprawling family teeming with plausible resentments, and a central mystery that unspools with the satisfying click of a well-oiled machine. The novel, like its predecessors, is a masterclass in narrative tension. It is also, I would argue, a masterclass in something else entirely.
Moriarty’s astonishing success is not, as the common wisdom holds, rooted in her talent for crafting suspense or her sharp eye for domestic drama. These are merely the delivery mechanisms. Her true, unacknowledged genius is for identifying, bottling, and selling a very specific emotional product: aspirational anxiety. Her novels are the definitive literature for the global comfortable class – those people who have enough to build a beautiful life, and therefore everything to lose.
Apples Never Fall presents the perfect case study. The Delaney family are a clan forged on the tennis court. The parents, Stan and Joy, have recently sold their successful tennis academy and are adrift in the unnerving quiet of retirement. Their four adult children orbit them, each a portrait of carefully curated disappointment: a high-flying physiotherapist whose personal life is a wreck, a venture capitalist of dubious ethics, a placid saviour-figure, and a listless rebel. They are handsome, witty, and marinated in the unique privilege that comes from a life where the mortgage has always been paid.
Then, a stranger named Savannah knocks on the door, bleeding and distressed. She insinuates herself into the family home, and shortly thereafter, the matriarch Joy vanishes. Is Savannah a grifter? A victim? Is Stan, a man whose competitive fury once defined him, a murderer? The questions are tantalising. But the real hook isn’t the ‘what’, it’s the ‘where’. The drama unfolds not in a grimy back alley but in a pristine suburban home, the kind with an immaculate garden and an open-plan kitchen. Moriarty’s genius is not to hold a mirror up to our souls, but to our tastefully decorated living rooms, revealing the hairline cracks in the plaster that we secretly suspected were there all along. It’s a neat trick.
The Gilded Tennis Court
The novel’s obsession with tennis is telling. It’s the quintessential country-club sport, a pursuit defined by decorum, expensive equipment, and brutal one-on-one competition. For the Delaneys, tennis is both the source of their fortune and the architecture of their discontent. The children are all former prodigies who, crucially, never quite made it to the top. Their lives are shaped by the long shadow of a potential they failed to realise – a deeply resonant anxiety for a professional class that has been taught to view life as a perpetual tournament.
This is Moriarty’s economic masterstroke. She intuits that for her target readership, the most terrifying monsters aren’t hiding under the bed; they are lurking in the FTSE 100, in the league tables for the best secondary schools, in the nagging fear that a neighbour’s extension is just that little bit grander than one’s own. The problems in a Moriarty novel are rarely about genuine existential threat. No one is about to be evicted. The central anxiety is one of slippage, of status, of keeping the whole precarious enterprise of upper-middle-class life from shattering. This is the wildcard analogy I find most fitting: Moriarty is less a novelist and more a luxury property developer of the soul. She builds these stunning, desirable structures of family and success, and then charges us admission to watch her reveal the hidden subsidence, the faulty wiring, the dry rot in the foundations.
One could, of course, argue that this is simply astute psychological portraiture, that the fears of the rich are as valid and human as the fears of the poor. Perhaps. But to ignore the specific economic context of these fears is to miss the point. The psychology Moriarty explores is almost exclusively the psychology of affluence. The arrival of Savannah, the interloper, is terrifying to the Delaneys not because she represents physical danger, but because she is a contamination of their hermetically sealed world. She is chaos in a universe built on order, need in a kingdom of plenty. She threatens the brand.
Two short paragraphs to make a point.
She represents the outside world they have worked so hard to keep at bay.
A Catalogue of Acceptable Fears
This is why Moriarty’s books are so profoundly comforting, even as they masquerade as thrillers. They present us with a catalogue of acceptable, manageable fears. Infidelity, professional jealousy, the slow curdling of love into resentment, the secrets that fester between siblings (a roster of dysfunction practically begging for a television deal) – these are the emotional calamities of people with safety nets. The resolution of the central mystery, when it comes, invariably restores the fragile equilibrium. The intruder is expelled, the misunderstanding is clarified, and the family, though bruised, endures. The fundamental structure of their comfortable lives is never truly threatened.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but this feels like the literary equivalent of disaster tourism. We get to peer into the abyss from the safety of a five-star hotel balcony, tut-tut at the mess, and feel a frisson of excitement before returning to our own, reassuringly intact, lives. The narrative assures us that even in the face of the unthinkable – a missing mother, a potential murder – the core tenets of our world remain unshaken: the family home will still be standing, the inheritance will likely be secure, and social standing, whilst dented, can be repaired.
I recall a conversation from years ago, with a publisher who had just rejected a manuscript. ‘It’s beautifully written,’ he said with a sigh, ‘but the characters are just a bit… poor. No one wants to read about people worrying about the gas bill’. It was a brutally honest, if dispiriting, assessment of the market. Liane Moriarty is far too shrewd to make such a mistake. Her characters worry, but they worry in the right postcodes. They fret over emotional betrayals, not bailiffs.
In the end, Apples Never Fall does what it says on the tin. The title, taken from a Russian saying, ‘Яблоки не падают никогда’ (‘Apples never fall ever’), gestures at the inescapable influence of family. But it works on another level, too. In Moriarty’s world, the apples – the comfortable, the successful, the privileged – never truly fall from the tree. They might wobble. They might get bruised. But the laws of narrative gravity, and commercial fiction, ensure they never, ever hit the ground. She has perfected a product that validates the anxieties of the comfortable whilst reassuring them that their world is, ultimately, indestructible. And for that, they will keep buying her books, by the sun-lounger and by the pallet-load. It is, in its own way, a kind of genius. A deeply cynical, unnervingly brilliant one.
