IN SECURITY

The personal and professional lives of a Transportation Security Administration employee converge in Schwarzschild’s novel.

Narrator Gary Waldman is well versed in grief and contemplation. When the novel opens, he’s a relatively recent widower and is doing his best to raise his 6-year-old son, Ben, on his own. He’s spent the last seven years working for the TSA at Albany International Airport in upstate New York. Through flashbacks, Schwarzschild reveals moments from Gary’s history, including the harrowing deaths of his father, mother, and wife. Gary, who had previously worked as a tennis coach, has mixed feelings about his job—but soon draws the attention of his co-workers and a powerful local family when he helps save the life of a wealthy man who collapsed in an airport bathroom. Gary is drawn to the man’s stepdaughter, Diane, even as the anniversary of his wife’s death looms. The arrival in town of Gary’s FBI agent brother-in-law, Hank, creates wrinkles both personal and professional, as Hank has reports of a possible terror plot. The two disparate threads found within this novel—a middle-aged man learning to reengage with the world and the threat of a very different form of trauma—coexist neatly for much of the book. The novel’s climax manages to incorporate Gary’s personal and professional crises and dovetails with the book’s themes of parental legacies and frayed parent-child bonds. It’s not a perfect ending, but the lived-in details of Gary’s life—and Schwarzschild’s work in making a fundamentally decent character dramatically compelling—make for an absorbing read.

Schwarzschild delivers a subdued look at one man’s life, punctuated by earned moments of tension.