I enjoy Liane Moriarty’s chatty, gossipy novels and always pre-order the new one. But Here One Moment disappointed me. Instead of a story, Moriarty decided to go with a premise, and it’s a trite one. The message that the novel delivers will the regularity of a metronome hitting a reader’s skull is this:
You can die at any moment, so live your life to the fullest! Have EXPERIENCES! Don’t let boring things such as duty and caution prevent you from having FUN. It’s all about FUN. Also, you need to TRAVEL. And MOVE. That’s what happiness is, incessant moving. And traveling, don’t forget traveling. Because you can just DIE. Everybody will DIE.
Original this idea is not, that’s a given.
Five hundred pages of chewing over the gnarled bone of our imminent mortality are loosely bound by the story told by Cherry, a deeply boring, smug and self-involved guru of the “travel and move” philosophy. Moriarty usually is at her best when she writes about families but Cherry’s bizarre obsession with travel makes a family an impossibility. Her life is vapid and her attempts at humor embarrassing.
This was supposed to be a light, cheery read but it turned out to be morbid and pointless. I’m being let down by favorite authors this year. First, Claudia Piñeiro decided to go all social-justicey, and now Moriarty is trying to be philosophical. Why it’s not OK to tell a great story without trying to teach readers an important lesson about life I have no idea. I want to be entertained, not improved.
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