Shortlisted for The Booker Prize 2025, The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits is a perceptive and beautifully understated novel of midlife reevaluation, relationships and identity. Not your average road trip tale, it tells the story of 55-year-old law professor, Tom, who drops his daughter off at university for the first time and keeps on driving, away from his home, wife Amy, and job. A dozen years previously, Amy had confessed to an affair, leading to the embittered but ever pragmatic Tom vowing to leave her once the kids left home. Now that time has come, Tom reflects on what he once graded a ‘C-minus marriage’ and the decisions he must take.
As the story opens, Tom outlines the whys and wherefores of Amy’s affair, a guy from the synagogue, ‘I saw Zach touch Amy’s hand under the fold-out table at the Purim food-bank drive’. She tells him it was a bid for attention and she doesn’t want a divorce, Tom kicks the can down the marital road and stays put, for his kids, so he believes.
Now here they are, enjoying a last family holiday in Cape Cod before taking daughter, Miri, to her student life in Pittsburgh, joined by adult son, Michael, and enjoying watching their offspring hang out together, even if their leaving the house for a night out gives Tom and Amy a potential taste of things to come, ‘staring at each other across the dining table’.
For Amy, who has been anticipating this crunch point, the tension is unbearable and she drops out of the drive to Miri’s university, leaving Tom to do the honours. After which, he keeps on driving, intent on visiting faces from the past, including an old flame. He may have left Amy, he thinks.
Markovits unpicks Tom’s ‘middle-aged man getting older’ mind with great acuity, and is excellent on the dynamics of family, and parenting in particular. Tom’s en route conversations and recollections explore possible reasons for his notably detached nature and Amy’s accusation that he’s cold or doesn’t care.
Inevitably there are other issues. Unbeknownst to Amy, Tom is taking a leave of absence from work, potential whispers of his name in a discrimination incident enough to rattle his solid, decades-long career.
His health is also giving cause for concern. Palpitations, fatigue, sudden head rush. Something perhaps akin to the andropause, his symptoms are a low hum throughout the book, his resistance to seeking rigorous medical tests further proof of ingrained inertia.
It appears that Tom has spent many years tiptoeing through life, avoiding both decision and action. At one point on his trip he confides to the afore-mentioned old flame that he just wants to get through unscathed. She thinks that’s no way to live, but it’s become Tom’s habit and now events are conspiring to force his hand.
‘There’s a phrase that used to go through my thoughts- the heavy tread of middle age on the family stairs- Moving around the house I sounded more and more like my dad, with an oof in each step.’
One of the more low-key titles on the Booker shortlist, Markovits’ classy, complex novel is a welcome inclusion.
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits is published by Faber & Faber, 256 pages.
