THE REST OF OUR LIVES, by Ben Markovits
Earlier this year, my fellow critics and I wrote — and spoke! — about interesting road-trip books published since Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” Pulling up on the penultimate day of 2025 after being shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Ben Markovits’s new novel, “The Rest of Our Lives,” puts a button, as they say in the theater, on that whimsical project. A very tender button.
As Markovits wrote recently in The New York Times, his creative focus was sharpened after he was diagnosed with cancer. There had been a dramatic descent of symptoms — purpling face, rapidly surfacing blood vessels — that seemed akin to an alien visitation, or a reminder of how close humans are to plants.
His protagonist, Tom Layward — so close to “wayward” — is also suffering from a mysterious illness, possibly long Covid. But even more, Tom is plain heartsick, in a high-functioning, low-key way: still brooding over a brief affair his wife, Amy, had a dozen years ago. He told himself he could leave her after their daughter, Miriam, graduated from Scarsdale High and went to college, and that day has come. Miri will go to Carnegie Mellon, whose 18 percent acceptance rate he coolly notes, comparing it to even more selective Ivies attained by children of family friends who attended private school.
Tom is a man of reason, not impulse, which is what will make his decision to point the family Volvo away from Pittsburgh, and go west instead of back to Westchester, more interesting. “If you continue to have illusions, that’s your fault,” he argues of the data on a spouse gathered during a long marriage. “It’s like being a Knicks fan.”
Amy, experienced here mostly in memory and as a disappearing voice on the iPhone that must of course be turned off for Tom to vanish properly, is beautiful; her husband notes how such beauty requires her to “keep still, so she didn’t give off false flares.” Maybe a little too still. She is “essentially unemployed,” having given up teaching after being stalked by a student while teaching at her alma mater Brearley, the fancy girls’ academy in Manhattan.
Her big, moneyed family, apparent Jewish royalty, has long vacationed at a compound in Wellfleet where Tom observes “perfect coastal summer weather, the kind only rich people can afford,” and an annual ice-cream stop, which strikes him as one of “the little childish rituals rich people have toward some of the blessings in their lives.”
He likes to think of himself as lower-middle class, because though his father worked in pharmaceuticals, he abandoned the family when Tom was in high school, and his mother worked as a school secretary. Also, he’s wistful about having chosen law over literature. He’s on leave from his teaching job after students complained about a hate-crime class, and one of the pretexts for his trip is that he might want to report a book about pickup basketball across the country.
Slowly and subtly it dawns on the reader that Tom’s encountering everyone necessary for a “This Is Your Life” episode: friends, strangers, his younger brother, an ex, his adult son, his father’s grave.
Markovits grew up in Texas and for a time played professional basketball in Germany, but is now a Londoner who has written many fine novels, including a trilogy inspired by the life of Lord Byron. “The Rest of Our Lives” is a soft swerve. It’s like being in the passenger seat while someone very articulate and engaging describes a mild chronic depression. Fundamentally, it’s about the condition of what we euphemistically call for far too long “middle age” (Tom is 55): a term that clouds how close the end might be, and the simultaneous urgency and impossibility of meaningful action.
The title recalls the great William Wyler movie “The Best Years of Our Lives” (talk about streaming — tears, that is), and though Tom is far from a shellshocked serviceman returning from World War II, this book, too, grand in its modesty, plumbs the limits of the American dream, hinging smoothly on small interpersonal moments.
In Markovits’s Times essay, in a characteristically understated shout-out to the murdered Hollywood great Rob Reiner, he mentions how Harry in “When Harry Met Sally” always reads the last page of a book first, in case he dies, so he knows how it ends. I don’t agree with that as a life habit, but it feels like more than coincidence that the final line of “The Rest of Our Lives” is, by my daytime running lights, this wackadoo year’s best.
THE REST OF OUR LIVES | By Ben Markovits | Summit | 239 pp. | $25
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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