Martha’s Vineyard. A private plane. A few rich passengers boarding. A foggy night. Uh-oh.
And a spine-tingling bit of foreshadowing: Two weeks later, one passenger will be giving an interview about the plane to New York magazine. Why? These are cosseted, secretive people. Their travels aren’t supposed to make news.
This is how Noah Hawley kicks off his ingeniously nerve-racking Before the Fall. If you didn’t already know that Hawley is a celebrated storyteller, you’ll know it before you finish the first page of this novel, his fifth.
If his books are relatively little known, blame that on his television and film work: He is currently the showrunner for Fargo, a TV adaptation so good it has won a Peabody award. Before that, he created My Generation and The Unusuals. He has plans to adapt Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle for the big screen. Special prize to anyone who can guess which other novel Hawley has said he thinks has excellent movie potential.
But Before the Fall has hardly been written as a pre-screenplay. This is one of the year’s best suspense novels, a mesmerizing, surprise-jammed mystery that works purely on its own, character-driven terms. Before the main action begins, we get an exact list — well, we hope it’s exact — of who was aboard that little plane. It was chartered by David Bateman, the head of what sounds a lot like Fox News. He was accompanied by his wife, Maggie, and their young children, Rachel and JJ.
The Batemans have invited another couple to join them: Ben Kipling, a Wall Street power player, and his wife, Sarah, who doesn’t enjoy the rustic pleasures of the Vineyard as profoundly as Maggie does. Sarah is perfectly drawn in only a few strokes. Beach sunsets bore her. She’d rather be at Barneys.
Then there’s the stranger, the last-minute passenger Maggie happened to invite for reasons not entirely clear. He is Scott Burroughs, a good-looking, middle-aged unsuccessful artist with whom Maggie has been exchanging smiles at the farmers’ market. Scott definitely doesn’t fit in with this private-plane set, but he welcomed the flight home to New York. Finally, the barely described crew members: pilot, co-pilot, beautiful stewardess and armed Bateman bodyguard.
Sixteen minutes after takeoff, all but two of these people are dead. And Hawley spends the rest of the book presenting what would be a variation on the classic locked-room whodunit, except for the big and noisy new element he throws in: an egomaniacal talk show commentator, Bill Cunningham, who is obsessed with the plane crash and determined to mourn and exploit the death of his boss.
Since David Bateman’s network is so like Fox, Cunningham is a version of Bill O’Reilly, who is quick to pronounce: “What we’re talking about here is nothing less than an act of terrorism, if not by foreign nationals then by certain elements of the liberal media.” And on he goes, speechifying and bullying, through the rest of the book.
The odd fact that Scott’s boyhood hero was the exercise pioneer Jack LaLanne, who specialized in such superhuman feats as pulling a boat through water while handcuffed, has inspired him to become a spectacular swimmer. So, early in the book, right after the crash, Scott manages to swim to Montauk in pitch darkness, despite a dislocated shoulder, with the 4-year-old JJ in tow. But in today’s tabloid atmosphere, as rendered so chillingly by Hawley, that makes him suspect.
Why would a starving artist hit on Maggie Bateman or rescue her orphaned son if he weren’t after the Batemans’ money? Even worse, the hiding place that Scott finds to avoid being stalked and slandered by the media belongs to a flighty left-wing heiress who mostly sees him as a collector’s item.
And we, the readers, would really like to know why that plane went down. But 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.
Where shall we start? How about with Scott himself? Even if he sounds badly disoriented back on dry land, his most recent paintings have depicted a series of transportation catastrophes. They were spooky to begin with. Now, thanks to so much unwanted attention they will make him a star.
Hawley has artfully filled Before the Fall with enough red herrings to satisfy a flock of sea gulls. Take the fact that Ben Kipling learns, just before he boards the plane, that he’s been caught laundering gazillions and will surely go to jail. (“But don’t worry,” he is assured by his lawyer, a hilariously vivid character who pretends to be an all-powerful fixer. “I’ve got a good lice guy.”).
Just as carefully, Hawley alludes to the fact that Rachel Bateman was kidnapped as a baby.
But the details are carefully held back until midbook, so we aren’t really sure how badly the family needs armed guards or “glass as thick as an unabridged copy of War and Peace” on its East River Drive windows.
And for extras, Hawley throws in Maggie’s predictably good-hearted sister and her creep of a husband, who may wind up as JJ’s stepfather and can’t believe his presumed windfall. It’s inevitable that this guy and Cunningham, America’s “raging voice of common sense,” will team up on the side of noisy injustice.
With so many possible explanations for what went wrong, the real one had better reach a high bar. Does it? I had doubts.
But this much is clear: Hawley has made it very, very easy to race through his book in a state of breathless suspense. Get to that endpoint. Then you can decide.
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