Friday Book Review: Laura Moriarty’s While I’m Falling

Let’s set aside any plausibility issues that might arise from the first scene in Lawrence novelist Laura Moriarty‘s new book, While I’m Falling (Hyperion). It’s fiction, after all, so we have to just go with this opening, in which the too-predictable life of a Johnson County family is wrecked when the attorney father returns early from “a two-day seminar on financial planning” to find a roofer in his bed.

Our house was on a cul-de-sac in a suburb of Kansas City that is known for its safety, excellent public schools, and complete lack of public transportation; still, my father said that for far too long, he truly perceived the man as some kind of confused, unshaven transient who had broken in to take a mid-morning nap.

It takes a few minutes — and the discovery of a love note to the roofer from his wife — for the attorney-father to figure out what has happened. For him, this is because his wife Natalie’s infidelity is unfathomable; for a reader, this opening is difficult for reasons that have more to do with Moriarty’s artistic choices. Yes, the roofer is a shockingly out-of-place character in a bedroom on this cul-de-sac, so he serves the plot well. Someone has to destroy this marriage, after all. But this particular roofer, we find out much later, was a lit major in college, has a master’s degree and did his thesis on Nabokov. He’s a roofer whose inquiry about the books on Natalie’s shelf is pretty much all it takes to get the attention-starved suburban housewife in the sack.

But he’s not our main concern anyway. He’s merely the one who begins to disrupt the previously placid life of Veronica, who is away at KU.