This is one of the year’s best suspense novels, a mesmerizing, surprise-jammed mystery that works purely on its own, character-driven terms ... Mr. Hawley does a beautiful job of turning his book into an extended tease, with separate chapters about each passenger and revelations about why each could have been a target.
The novel suffers a bit under the weight of [its] structure in the beginning. Too many characters are introduced in too few pages, and there’s too much repetition. But it doesn’t take long for Hawley to hit his stride ... Noah Hawley really knows how to keep a reader turning the pages, but there’s more to the novel than suspense. On one hand, Before the Fall is a complex, compulsively readable thrill ride of a novel. On the other, it is an exploration of the human condition, a meditation on the vagaries of human nature, the dark side of celebrity, the nature of art, the power of hope and the danger of an unchecked media. The combination is a potent, gritty thriller that exposes the high cost of news as entertainment and the randomness of fate.
Mr. Hawley withholds the unpredictable truth about the plane crash until the final chapters, though veteran readers of thrillers may not be particularly impressed by the tricks he uses to draw out the suspense—a case of temporary amnesia that prevents Burroughs from remembering the flight and a black box that investigators take an eternity to fish out of the ocean. The real satisfaction of this addictive novel is in the face-off between Burroughs and the media mob spearheaded by Cunningham and his tabloid shock troops. On one side are the rabid forces of fearmongering, vulgarity and snide insinuation. To his surprise, Burroughs becomes a very public standard-bearer for patience and decency, and the quiet battle he wages for those virtues is cathartic. Before the Fall is about the gulf that separates perception and truth, and the people who fall into it.
Crash it does, and soon readers and federal officials alike are struggling to understand why. It’s an irresistible mystery and, for the icing on his fictional cake, Hawley adds a satirical portrait of a cable news star named Bill Cunningham that will delight some readers and outrage others ... Hawley has spun a tale that’s at once an intriguing puzzle, a tasty satire and a painful story of human loss.
Hawley’s novel is driven by a fascination with human reaction to extreme events and the capacity for resilience, and a careful look at what happens when outside forces break people, or merely bend them ... Hawley’s prose is direct and unadorned, with priority given to the story, so it’s no surprise the author is at his best in moments of high action and rising tension ... Unfortunately, some of the cast are better drawn than others, with some character sketches nothing more than feints and diversions—interesting but ultimately extraneous to the plot. And the order of those backstory chapters points the reader toward the conclusion anyway.
The first few chapters of this well-crafted novel, Mr. Hawley’s fifth, are particularly intense. Scott surfaces amid flames on the water and has to guess which direction to swim ... Crucially, though, Mr. Hawley doesn’t make the mistake of conflating the characters under easy labels such as 'victims' and 'survivors.' Instead, he renders them all individuals with complete backstories. The variety of characters gives him a chance to explore many worlds — media, finance, art — without committing to just one ... Before the Fall lies somewhere on the continuum between crime and literary fiction; if it’s not quite Jonathan Franzen, nor is it Robert Ludlum. Echoes of suspenseful television favorites are hardly incidental given Mr. Hawley’s recent work on FX hit Fargo. This is a pretty much ideal summer vacation read—though you might think twice about taking it on a plane.
