Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies was such a runaway success – debuting at No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and adapted for a television miniseries starring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Zoë Kravitz – that she always had her work cut out for her if she was to return the fluctuating narrative back to the page. Recognising this hurdle, Moriarty opens the sequel (her first) with a note to readers that details the way the new novel both responds to its TV adaptation – by making Laura Dern’s Renata and Meryl Streep’s Mary-Louise more central characters – and returns readers to the original landscape, the fictional Pirriwee Peninsula along Sydney’s northern beaches.
Moriarty immediately situates the reader back in Australia: a magpie swoops “like a missile” at an unsuspecting cyclist against a backdrop of “bright yellow native wattle” and “lush-purple” jacarandas. Time has passed, in both the real and fictional world. It has been 12 years since the 2014 publication of Big Little Lies, and the sweet kindergarteners at the heart of the original are teenagers now, with mothers in the midst of menopause. The idyllic setting is shattered when a severed human finger is posted to the local high school, setting the scene for a sequel packed with all the intrigue, drama and suspense of the first.
Sadly, for the most part, Big Little Truths fails to deliver. In the first book, the death of a major character brings an urgency that alleviates the heft of the novel (both are more than 400 pages). A key figure in the community has died – who? And which of the melodramatic but mostly unremarkable Pirriwee parents is responsible? This tension is mirrored in the kindergarten cohort where Ziggy, son of newcomer Jane, has been accused of choking one of the other girls on his first day. Themes of abuse and toxic masculinity offer a moral underpinning, while romance and tensions between the mothers provide drama that the Real Housewives would envy. Whatever it lacked in nuance, Big Little Lies made up for in thrills and intrigue.
Big Little Truths, however, has lost this edge. United by their shared experience in the first book, the Pirriwee mums – Renata, Jane, Bonnie, Madeline and Celeste – have become each other’s ride or dies. In the midst of “the menopause”, the women carry each other through the various crises of middle-age – health scares, ageing parents and increasingly alienated teenagers. The only thing that threatens this equilibrium is the discovery that their kids are vaping, and this low-level drama doesn’t rock the boat for long.
The children, who are rehashing the central events of the novel to a counsellor in the polyvocal chorus that will be familiar to readers of the first novel, also seem to live relatively uncomplicated lives. There are hints at lingering trauma from the events of their childhood, but no lasting scars. They are, for the most part, totally normal, occasionally obnoxious, earnest, endearing teenagers. The stakes of the first novel have lowered, replaced by these more immediate, intimate dramas.
The realism of these scenes sits uncomfortably against its melodrama, although this too feels flat. There’s a mysterious, stalker figure whose presence is so obviously signalled throughout the first half of the novel that it’s hard to find him genuinely alarming, and the severed finger of the opening pages is, for the most part, relegated to the background. For a large part of the narrative it feels as if the novel’s dramatic tension is too far away to really ignite.
As much as it’s a relief to see women united rather than in cruel competition, and to witness some genuinely touching moments between them as they rediscover themselves and each other during a period so like adolescence – fragile, hilarious and full of emotion – it’s not enough to carry the novel. These moments of true connection and vulnerability are small punctuations in a novel that still shoots for high drama and falls short. When we finally get to Moriarty’s trademark reveal it feels overly contrived and the heavy-handedness of the moral lesson cheapens the subtle, but infinitely more powerful, moments between the women.
This isn’t to suggest there’s no fun to be had here. There’s enough happening in the first half of the novel to keep things moving, and the return of familiar faces feels like putting on a beach cardigan. But for its 400-plus pages, Big Little Truths is too long and offers too little reward.
Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty is out now (via Pan Macmillan in Australia, Penguin Random House in the UK, and Crown in the US)
