Apples Never Fall

One of the first images the novel offers are apples, which Joy drops on her way back from the market and leaves rotting by the side of the road: “Four green apples lay scattered on the dry grass beneath the tree as if they had spilled and rolled from the bike’s basket” (1). Apples, which figure in the novel at critical places, symbolize the Delaney family’s restoration to emotional and psychological health. It’s tempting to burden apples with the considerable negative symbolic weight they bear from the temptation narrative of Genesis: the fruit that ensured humanity’s downfall. Within the logic of such an inherited tragic reading of the fruit, apples symbolize human frailty, the considerable (and justified) weight of judgment, the righteousness of punishment, and the sorry results when humanity gives in to arrogance and the mistaken assumption that humanity is in charge. In addition, given the proverb that provides the novel’s title, apples suggest the inevitable failures of one generation being passed down to the next, a sense of futility and eternal recurrence without the possibility of change, the promise of evolution.

The novel uses such inherited meanings ironically. Far from being responsible for the Fall of the House Delaney (tennis with its self-serving, self-sustaining logic does that), apples are key to its restoration. Joy is determined to bake an apple crumb pie, Stan’s favorite dessert, to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Indeed, the recipe for apple crumb pie comes from Stan’s mother, who, at the most difficult moments in her strained relationship with Stan’s father, would make the dessert as a gesture of reconciliation and enduring love. Joy is on a mission of love when she goes off on her new bike to secure apples from a nearby grocer that Valentine’s Day morning when her bike gets a flat and she must reluctantly leave the apples by the side of the road. Apples, then, express the persistence of her love for Stan, a love that persists despite the imperfections of their relationship, despite the volatility of their emotions, and despite the deep history of simmering grudges to which they cling.

Within that toxic world, apples symbolize the freshness, the ripeness, the powerful coaxing pull of newness, the sweet taste of the immediate, and the healthy willingness to forgive, to relinquish the hard logic of regret and blame. Apples are organic: They grow, they thrive, and they reject stasis. As such, apples symbolize the family’s ability in the end to change, to move in newer and more emotionally promising directions. Even Savannah—whose abusive adolescent life taught her to suspect and outright reject the value of eating—masters Stan’s family recipe and sends Amy a nearly perfect apple crumb pie. Apples thus come to symbolize the new—at once a continuation of the past, which is never entirely abandoned, but with the striking promise of the new. Apples are crucial to bringing together the dysfunctional Delaneys, key to the promise of genuine emotional growth.

It’s an ugly necklace, a non-descript chain with a simple old-school clunk key dangling from it. When Joy treats Savannah to an afternoon shopping to thank her for helping around the house, she asks Savannah about the curious necklace she wears, a clunky sort of non-jewelry jewelry that is in fact a simple key. She stammers that it’s for her a symbol of escape, of freedom, of possibility. It’s not a pretty necklace, Joy decides. The necklace Savannah wears symbolizes the ugliness of her own emotional prison, her own enslavement to a past she can’t forgive or forget—a choice she makes because, symbolically, the key is right there, literally under her nose.

It turns out just the opposite: That symbolic reading reflects Savannah’s complete lack of insight into the trauma of her past and her blindness to a way forward to redemption. While the Delaneys move toward healing by coming to terms with the past and finally determining a strategy for unlocking the burden of the past, Savannah resists that evolution. In the closing chapter, she reflects the desperate strategy of ignoring the traumas of the past—with the passenger who sits next to her on the plane, she still plays a game of which-persona-shall-I-be today. “The girl was flying to Adelaide to visit her mother” (457) is a deadpan assertion that denies the reality of what Savannah did, the depth of her villainy, and the extent to which her past imprisons her. She rationalizes her action’s viciousness—drugging her mother and leaving her in a locked room with few provisions, a plan basically designed to starve her mother to death. Surely, she figures, her mother found a way out. Surely, she didn’t stay in the room and just die.

As Savannah looks calmly out the plane’s window, at the patchwork quilt of suburbia below, she enjoys the feeling of being above the clouds, a suggestion of her emotional disconnection and her sense of apartness that makes genuine emotional recovery impossible. “From here above the clouds, life looked so peaceful and so manageable” (463). The key that hangs about her neck, the key to the bedroom where she locked her mother, thus symbolizes Savannah’s own imprisonment or, more precisely, her self-imprisonment. She’s trapped within a past she cannot forget, a trauma she cannot forgive, with the key right there. Genuine emotional freedom is near and yet beyond reach.