Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Noah Hawley

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller

401 pages, published May 31, 2016

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

On a foggy summer night, 11 people – 10 privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter – depart Martha’s Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York.  Sixteen minutes later plane has crashed into the ocean.  The only survivors are Scott Burroughs, the painter, and a four-year-old boy who is now the last remaining member of an immensely wealthy and powerful media mogul’s family.   Before the Fall weaves between the aftermath of the crash and the backstories of the passengers and crew members including a Media Mogul and his family, a captain of Wall Street and his wife, a party boy just in from London, a young woman questioning her path in life, and a career pilot.

Quotes 

“In the absence of facts…. we tell ourselves stories.”

 

“It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful. And he liked that idea. That service to others brought happiness. It was self-involvement that led to depression, to spiraling questions about the meaning of things.”

 

“Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you.  And then it’s over.”

 

“Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.”

 

“You have kids and you think I made you, so we’re the same, but it’s not true. You just get to live with them for a while and maybe help them figure things out.”

 

“It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past.”

 

“Anything is possible. Everything is gettable. You just have to want it badly enough.”

 

“Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?”

 

“What’s a handshake, after all, except a socially acceptable way to make sure the other guy doesn’t have a knife behind his back.”

 

“Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.”

 

“Where the average person appreciates the beauty of surf and waves, Gus, an engineer, sees only practical design. Gravity, plus ocean current, plus wind. Poetry to the common man is a unicorn viewed from the corner of an eye—an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.”

 

“Never fight tomorrow’s fight today,”

 

“But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire’s account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict.” 

My Take

Having read and enjoyed The Good Father by Noah Hawley (in addition to the Fargo television series which he created), I looked forward to Before the Fall.  I was not disappointed.  In addition to penning a suspenseful mystery, Hawley provides the reader with an examination of human nature and an exploration of existential issues.  All in an entertaining, suspenseful format.