Before the Fall by Noah Hawley
Rating: ★★★
Going into Before the Fall I expected a thriller. After the first few chapters I was not so thrilled. Don't get me wrong: this book isn't bad. It has a lot of great aspects, but I was led to believe it was a thriller, when, really, it's a drama. There was very little suspense. The thrilling event happens in the first chapter, and the rest of the book deals with the before and after. Yes, there is an ongoing investigation to figure out what happened on the plane, but I really didn't care about what happened on the plane. I cared about Scott and JJ. I thought it was interesting to see the before of each of the people on the plane, but there was nothing pushing me to finish this book. About half way through I got into a reading slump. I just didn't want to pick it up. It took me a week to push past this, but eventually I got to the last three chapters, which are, finally, thrilling.
SPOILERS
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Let's talk about Scott. Scott is a hero from beginning to end. I liked Scott, but I thought he was a little unrealistic. He was TOO perfect. Yes, I understand that he used to be a raging alcoholic, but we never see him in that struggle. We only see him as this perfect man who saved a little boy, who rejects positive attention from the media, who refuses to sleep with naked, willing women, who doesn't even think about JJ's fortune, or the money he could make selling his paintings. He goes on TV for an interview with a man who has been dragging his name through the mud, and he doesn't even try to defend himself! He just tells the truth. I have a hard time believing he wouldn't have even a little bit of an internal struggle here.
Noah Hawley draws some very interesting parallels between Scotts life after the crash and his time struggling to survive in the ocean with the boy on his back. The placement of paragraphs side by side, shifting between "present day" and the image of the 20 foot wave rising over Scott's head, creates an intensity that wouldn't normally be present in a living room or an expressway scene.
I am a big fan of the ending. I love that the copilot was responsible. It wasn't a terrorist attack or a personal attack on the billionaire. It was a heartbroken, and disturbed young man. A very good twist.
Favorite Quotes:
"Night is night and morning is morning and to confuse the two can lead to lingering displacement" (232).
"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 remain obsessed, even as our bodies move on" (354)?
