Apples Never Fall is at once a tennis novel and an anti-tennis novel. Tennis defines the Delaneys as a family. They’re all gifted tennis players, but importantly, they’re not gifted enough. In that very failure, however, they each find their way to redemption.

Unlike team sports, tennis demands the discipline of apartness, a focus on the individual. It compels a person to deny the humanity of others and focus on strategies to exploit vulnerabilities to assert dominance and control. It’s about the dynamic of power and control. It insists on a person relentlessly driven to smooth out human imperfections that can cost critical points in showdown matches. Because the individual is so exposed, so vulnerable, tennis is unforgiving, and errors in judgment become the stuff of haunting memories. Tennis allows only two strategies for meeting challenges: Hang back along the line in the hope that retreat might create opportunity or charge the net and risk avoidable collisions. The game functions on the dynamic of attack and retreat—and, much like other intensely individual sports, an inherent temptation is to cheat, to deny others righteous victories by playing against the game itself.

In this, the Delaneys reveal their struggle to master a game that in its symbolic expression is everything that the novel argues destroys healthy emotional living.