Before the Fall

David Bateman, a conservative cable news mogul, charters a private plane to take him, his wife, and their two young children home to New York City from Martha’s Vineyard. They are joined by another wealthy couple, the Kiplings, as well as Scott Burroughs, a down-on-his-luck middle-aged painter acquainted with Bateman’s wife Maggie. When the plane abruptly crashed into the water, Scott and four-year-old J.J. Bateman are the only survivors. Hailed as a hero for swimming the boy to safety, Scott finds himself the focus of unwanted media attention. Meanwhile, federal investigators, including Treasury officials who were building a case against financer Ben Kipling, are desperate to found out what happened, and Bateman’s controversial star pundit sees an issue worth rallying around.

Noah Hawley is best known these days as the creator of the supremely enjoyable television series Fargo, but 2017’s Before the Fall is the fifth book in a literary career dating almost years. The same sensibility permeates both works. In Fargo, Hawley brings a darkly humorous tone, heavy symbolism, and an almost biblical sense of catastrophe to small-town Minnesota criminal shenanigans. So too goes Before the Fall, where he balances characters’ place-in-the-cosmos fulminations with intimate, seemingly mundane, sometimes funny moments and turns nearly everyone into a tragic figure.

Throughout it all, Hawley maintains a consistent narrative structure that allows him to control the rate of revelation. In the present, Scott moves toward recovery, not only from his injuries, but from years of passivity; Maggie’s sister Eleanor embraces her new role as mother to J.J. despite her greedy, indifferent husband; and crash investigator Gus works his way closer to finding out what happened on that plane. In between, we learn the histories of all on board, from Bateman to his stealthy Israeli bodyguard to young flight attendant Emma to philosophical, well-read Captain Melody. The novel unfolds in layers, drawing the reader in as each is peeled back.

There are, however, unfortunate exceptions to this complexity. Maggie’s husband, a selfish hipster manchild named Doug, is one-dimensionally detestable. And naming the co-pilot who benefitted from his family’s political connections despite his own mediocrity “Busch” seems almost too pointed a barb. Then there is Bill Cunningham, an amalgamation of the worst of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck turned up to eleven, an influential troll who will, through innuendo, smear Scott as a terrorist if it helps the ratings and serves his narrative. Such a one-dimensional buffoon would ordinarily be cause for complaint (compare to Fargo’s much more interesting antagonists), but his snarling opposition does at least drive Scott to take action. That said, their confrontation toward the end of the book is far less climactic than the story warrants.

In Before the Fall, Hawley has gripped readers with a philosophical mystery that meditates on loss as often as it entertains or enthralls, but a few uninspired character choices and a weak ending render it inferior to his television work.

7.75/10