Nine novels in, Liane Moriarty’s output falls somewhere between empire and institution: a reliable bastion of breezy yet propulsive storytelling, smartly informed by relevant issues of the day (infertility, wellness culture, domestic abuse). Her books claim prime real estate at chain stores and airports kiosks and regularly go on to become glossy television fodder, more often than not fronted by her fellow Australian Nicole Kidman (see “Big Little Lies,” “Nine Perfect Strangers” and the upcoming “The Last Anniversary,” which she’ll produce).
At the same time, Moriarty is still consigned to the metaphorical broom closet of “women’s fiction” — dismissed as something less than literature or damned with faint pink praise. Never mind that her latest, the busy but unhurried “Here One Moment,” is as demographically diverse as a phone book. Granted, it helps when your character pool is pulled from a flight manifest: a short domestic plane ride between the sunny Tasmanian capital of Hobart and Sydney.
Or it should have been short, except for a two-hour delay that leaves passengers tetchy and frazzled, each one caught up in the private drama of mislaid plans. Among them: the 40-ish engineer missing his daughter’s grammar-school “Lion King”; the contract lawyer turned bleary stay-at-home mom left to wrangle a screaming infant and a vomitous toddler; and the beautiful flight attendant spending perhaps her worst birthday on the tarmac, distributing “light snacks” and strained apologies in between desperate rummages for a tampon.
Into this maelstrom of ordinary inconvenience arrives someone who may or may not be extraordinary: a quiet woman, neatly dressed and with hair “the soft silver of an expensive kitten,” who stands up in her seat 45 minutes after takeoff. “I expect catastrophic stroke,” she proclaims with no particular flair, pointing to a preoccupied 50-something man on a laptop. “Age 72.” And so it goes down the rows, the solemn finger of fate: Heart disease, age 84; cardiac arrest, age 91; diabetes, age 79.
Her impromptu performance might be dismissed as a kooky parlor game by the passengers whose presumptive ends still lie decades away, but it is less amusing to the ones given more immediate and violent fates: workplace accident, age 43; assault, age 30; intimate partner homicide, age 25. Even the baby on board, blameless except for the screaming, receives his sentence; drowning, age 7.
And when a shy, pretty 19-year-old named Kayla is killed in a car crash, as predicted, several months later, followed shortly by an elderly couple whose passing had also been ordained on the plane, the whole thing no longer seems like an obtuse in-flight joke or a fun dinner-party anecdote. “The Death Lady,” as the excitable internet soon christens her, has either seen the future or summoned it. So what does that mean for the diffident tech worker whose 30th birthday now looms with the threat of some bloody end, or the anxious newlywed whose sweet, hapless husband seems like the last man likely to murder his wife?
Moriarty is in no great rush to resolve these mysteries. Over 500-plus pages, she dips leisurely into the daily lives of a half-dozen or so characters while also doing a slow narrative striptease on the inscrutable Lady, whose name turns out to be Cherry and whose recall of her behavior on the plane is a confounding blank, even if her core memories — lost loves, career pivots, private grievances — are as fresh to her as yesterday.
All these intersecting plotlines require a certain vigilance from the reader, and an ability to retain their disparate threads from one brief, round-robin chapter to the next. Some protagonists, inevitably, are more compelling than others: Allegra, the flight attendant whose outer loveliness is belied by crippling self-doubt; the increasingly addled Paula, whose fear for her small son triggers a long-dormant case of O.C.D.; or Leo, whose hunger to be the best provider-husband-father-employee might actually be the death of him.
A lot also hangs on your investment in Cherry, whose shrouded back story takes up much of the book (I liked her odd-duck meanderings, eventually), along with your appreciation of a final “twist” that wafts in almost casually, with a let’s-just-wrap-this-puppy-up shrug.
Moriarty’s signatures are still reassuringly present, if somewhat diluted across these pages: her way of conjuring believable characters from a few short sentences — they may be archetypes, but they’re well-drawn ones — and the gentle humor and unshowy emotional intelligence that undergirds it. (She also remains one of the few mainstream fiction writers to consistently center the joys and tribulations of midlife and beyond, as if turning 40 does not in fact compel one to dissolve into dust like a cursed mummy.)
As easily as it goes down, though, “Here One Moment” too often misses the tug and wallop of a good, taut thriller. In a way, the book itself feels like a generous sketch, less a fully realized novel than a work in progress still searching for its final form. Maybe that’s a job for Nicole Kidman; let her take it from here.
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