The Rest of Our Lives
Road trip exposes family fault lines Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin
Benjamin Markovits’ novel, TheRest of Our Lives is one of six novels shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Chosen from 153 submissions, this year’s selection celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality writing in English and published in the UK or Ireland.
The book has marked autobiographical elements that the novelist shares with his anti-hero, Tom Layward. Tom is afflicted with the same medical symptoms the author experienced during his cancer journey after a lymphoma diagnosis changed his life. Both author and narrator are basketball obsessives. Tom fantasises about finally researching and writing the book on basketball he had planned to complete in his youth but never did, while Markovits played professional basketball in Germany. Both have academic credentials: Tom is a law professor, while the author is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Oxford. Both character and author are middle-aged with children old enough to leave home, potential triggers for mid-life and family crises. Tom states, ‘There’s a phrase that used to go through my thoughts—the heavy tread of middle age on the family stairs’. But that is where the similarities appear to end. Unlike Tom whose career is faltering—he’s been suspended from work after allegations of racism and sexism—Markovits has enjoyed incremental critical acclaim, initially as one of Britain’s best young writers, and now on the cusp of a literary pinnacle as one of only six novelists on the prestigious Booker shortlist.
The book is to a large extent predicated on contrasts. Tom is a lapsed Catholic who grew up in penury after his father left the family. On the other hand, Tom’s wife, Amy Layward, is Jewish and a member of the cultured Naftali family, whose good taste is evident in every aspect of their comfortable and cultivated lifestyle, which Tom labours to emulate. Growing up emotionally deprived as an only child in a risk-averse single-mother household, Tom attaches great importance to family values and strives to give his family—his wife Amy, his son Michael and his daughter Miriam (Miri)—the financial security and emotional stability he never had. At the core of the novel is the contrast between the glossy facade of an ostensibly successful and united middle-class family and the treacherous undercurrent of a betrayal that disrupts their lives and undermines family trust. The cause of this catastrophe is Amy’s infidelity, a three-month affair apparently triggered by boredom with suburban life in conservative middle America.
At the time of the affair, Tom promises himself that he will leave the marriage when his youngest child Miriam leaves home. Twelve years later, he drives her to college in Pittsburgh and then, instead of returning to the empty nest, he begins a road trip that incorporates old friends, a former lover and new acquaintances along the way to his acknowledged goal of visiting his father’s grave, clearly a compulsion to draw closer to the father he yearned for and hardly knew. Threaded through the narrative are basketball anecdotes and games he plays with strangers and friends, reigniting his youthful literary ambition to write a history of basketball in the United States, as one way of confronting and surmounting past failures. All these vicissitudes of life are captured in a gentle reverie of reflection and quiet analysis. There are no lacerating outbursts of a tormented soul. This is everyman trying to understand the vagaries of the human condition, where he stands and, importantly, trying to discern where he wants to be in a fractured world.
As the reader accompanies Tom from one destination to another, who he meets seems of less importance than these characters serving as entry points into his heart and mind and his efforts to understand the chaos enveloping him. With an economy of brush strokes, Markovits has painted a portrait of a husband and father floundering in a morass of doubt, uncertain of where he’s driving next and unsure of his goals in a life that offers no guarantees of sustained happiness, despite his best efforts. Tom is everyman coming to terms with career setbacks, shattered values and fading hopes.
Through it all, this familial and societal disintegration is echoed in Tom’s physical symptoms. Is his illness a mirror of a sick society that deludes us into working for objectives that, in the end, prove meaningless? While this is a novel mainly about betrayal, alienation, loneliness and depression, Markovits inserts positive values into his narrative, reinforcing family values potentially capable of restoring Tom’s faith and beliefs, and leaving the reader with hope in human resilience and the innate capacity to survive and recover and, importantly, to begin again. ‘If you’re sick and might die, this is how people treat you, especially if they love you. You should just enjoy it,’ Tom tells himself.
This is a novel about one man’s road to healing, the pitfalls along the way and the unpredictable rewards that, at the very end, succeed in shining a light into the darkness. Drawn with sensitivity and a light touch, this depiction of an American family—parting and reuniting—will resonate with those grappling with insecurities and disappointments. And who among us can truly attest to a life completely devoid of those? While this is, indeed, a study of the human faults, foibles and fantasies with which we are all afflicted in varying degrees, it is also a positive affirmation of the capacity to endure betrayal, the human need to nurture connections that make life meaningful, and the desire to salvage the best that remains from the worst situations and, despite setbacks, the resurgence of hope.
Markovits explores a fractured marriage that, simultaneously, holds within it seeds of destruction and the power of regeneration. Perhaps that is as close as one can come to a happy ending.
The Rest of our Lives
Ben Markovits
Faber & Faber, 2025
Distributed by Allen & Unwin
