I love Noah Hawley, the showrunner, who has created two great seasons of Fargo and one decent season; a bizarre but fascinating season of Legion; and an under-appreciated season of The Unusuals. With his television work, however, Hawley has always worked in the confines of another property, whether it’s the framework of Fargo, the characters of Legion, or the constricts of a network police procedural in The Unusuals. I was deeply curious as to who Hawley is in his natural state: What kind of yarn […]
Sometimes it take a literal plane crash to elucidate our lives
Last month over on Oohlo in discussing the season three finale of Noah Hawley’s television program Fargo I had the following comment: “Hawley is also never just telling us a plot, he’s crafting a story. Not everything we see moves the story along, but everything means something, grows out the larger themes.” As I was reading Before the Fall, I had the same feeling about his literary work. On the surface this is a story about a plane crash and the people who perished and […]
The Least Thriller, Thriller
I had a conflicted reading of this book. Part of it was that the book was billed as a mystery/thriller and that’s not what was delivered. The book starts with some New York elites preparing to leave their summer homes on Martha’s Vineyard on their private jet. We quickly meet the characters who will become the crux of the story: the media mogul and his family, banking scheister and his wife, the pilot, co-pilot, flight attendant, and the struggling artist. The plane crashes (not a […]
A surprising and interesting story
When my library book club voted on the second half of the year’s selections, Noah Hawley’s Before the Fall was one of the options to read. I was not enthused by the tagline—suspense thriller about two survivors of a plane crash. I’m picky about mystery, and I am even more particular when it comes to suspense. I defer to Ms. Angela Martin of The Office in one and only one question of taste: WORD. Anyway, I was not excited that it was the FIRST book […]