Following the success of Bryan Reardon’s debut novel, Finding Jake (2015), which became a New York Times bestseller, friends warned him about the sophomore slump. “I didn’t believe any of it,” says 47-year-old Reardon.
But he did encounter one hurdle. The protagonist of his follow-up thriller, The Real Michael Swann (Dutton, June), is a woman, Michael Swann’s wife, Julia. “I was really committed to writing a strong, relatable female character,” says Reardon, who drew on his own life for Finding Jake.
The new novel opens with Michael going missing after a bombing at New York City’s Penn Station. As Julia searches for her husband—and tries to determine whether he’s alive—she thinks back on their marriage and wonders if he’s really the man she thought she knew.
Though the novel involves a high degree of fictionalization, it was inspired by an experience Reardon and his wife had. After a fire shut down service on one of the train lines, Penn Station became overcrowded and hot.
Reardon says that he was “amazed at how quickly the place filled up [with people],” adding, “My brain went immediately to all the awful things that could happen.” However unnerving the incident, Reardon had an idea: “What if someone did that on purpose? What if someone set the fire?”
Reardon also uses The Real Michael Swann to explore questions about how careers and lifestyles have changed, with sureties like company loyalty and retirement pensions increasingly going to the wayside. Julia and Michael, he says, belong to a generation of middle-aged people who “built a life they expected they would have based on how they grew up. They thought it was untouchable. All of a sudden, they’re finding out that all this stuff they bought, all these mortgages they have, all these car payments—they’ve become like Marley’s chains.”
How all of this links together is the stuff of spoilers. But, for Reardon, the novel is more than its thrilling premise. “We’re so afraid of this concept of terrorist attacks and foreign terrorists. But no one’s talking about the far more likely scenario that, all of a sudden, the person supporting your family is going to lose his job.”
