Fascinating, whatever the genre 
 A private jet takes off from Martha's Vineyard for the New York City area with a family of four aboard, plus another couple, a security guard, a crew of three, and a forty-something painter invited along in a kindly impulse. Eighteen minutes later, the plane has crashed into Long Island Sound killing everybody on board except for the painter, Scott Burroughs, who swims through the night with a four-year-old boy on his back, the only other survivor. He is of course hailed as a hero. The rest of the novel alternates between outlining the back-stories of the various victims and following the storm of interest unleashed by the tragedy, from the forensic investigation to media prurience. Before the Fall and after it, in roughly equal measure. It is a brilliantly constructed novel, with the parts fitting together like clockwork. My only criticism is that Hawley does not quite seem to have decided what genre he is writing: straight novel or thriller. 
 As a young reader, I was fascinated by Thornton Wilder's 1928 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which tracks the stories of five people who, quite by accident, came together on a bridge in Peru and were killed when it collapsed. That book is existential, even religious, as it searches for meaning behind an apparently random event of the kind that is often described as an Act of God. In Hawley's novel, of course, the crash presumably had some earthly cause that can be investigated: mechanical failure, pilot error, terrorism, or murder. The victims are also far from strangers, yet the stories of so many lives brought to this point and then abruptly cut short has much the same interest as in Wilder's book, especially as Hawley has such skill in delineating real characters, both good and bad, in a very few pages each. 
 But then there is the matter of that investigation. There are ample reasons why either of the two tycoons on the flight might have become targets. David Bateman is the head of an ultra-ultra-rightwing television news organization; Ben Kipling is an international funds manager who has fallen afoul of the SEC. We will form more theories as we read on. But as story followed story, I felt a slight but constant conflict; I wanted to get to know them simply as people, rather than scrutinizing them for possible clues to the mystery. I didn't want to feel I was writing each of them off as the forensic focus passed onto a new theory of the crash. But the conflict of genres only became a real problem when Hawley stooped to a populist treatment more typical of airport fiction, a voyeuristic exaggeration of the lives of the very powerful, very bigoted, or very rich. 
 He is much more successful with the more ordinary types, such as the two wives, the pilot, and especially the painter, Scott Burroughs. In the end, I felt it was Scott's interactions with JJ, the four-year-old boy he has rescued, his aunt who takes charge of him, and the surprisingly sensitive NTSB investigator that really gave the book its heart as a true novel. All reinforced by insights into Scott's earlier life and descriptions of his current paintings, which suggest true genius coming at last to fruition. Which is not to say that the thriller element was not well handled too; the ultimate denouement, simultaneously in the cockpit and in a television studio, was edge-of-your-seat stuff. All right, perhaps the one was a little random and the other frankly implausible--but it was the character and heart of Scott Burroughs that won me over.