Tired of your marriage? Take this novel's advice

Telegraph

14-03-2025

Tom and Amy Layward are facing more than just an empty nest. Twelve years ago Amy had an affair, and while Tom didn't then want to break up his family over it, he made a deal with himself: 'When [their daughter] Miriam goes to college, you can leave, too.'
The Rest of Our Lives, Benjamin Markovits's twelfth novel, begins with the family on holiday on Cape Cod. No one is happy. Miriam's boyfriend is splitting up with her because he thinks they should be free to have 'the full college experience'. Amy is picking fights and drinking too much. And Tom, now 55, is suffering from suspected long Covid. When they get back to their home in New York, tensions erupt, and Tom alone ends up driving Miriam to Pittsburgh for the start of her new life.
It's the perfect opportunity to make good on his deal. So after dropping his daughter off at college, he turns off his phone and keeps driving west. He has an idea he'll visit his brother and some old college friends; maybe take another crack at the basketball book he's always wanted to write – but he has no plans beyond these. He doesn't even have to get back to his job as a law professor, being on a forced leave of absence after making some ill-advised comments in his hate crime class. His only concern, he says, is to 'work out what to do next'.
Adulterous spouse, man in crisis: even without the reference to Tom's aborted PhD on John Updike, the influence is clear. Yet the writer Markovits seems to be channelling most is Richard Ford – and not simply because Ford's last book, Be Mine (2023), also featured a soul-searching road trip across America. Like Frank Bascombe, star of that book and four others, Tom's defining trait is apathy: 'First I wanted to be a professor, then I wanted to be a writer, but I ended up going to law school because . . . I thought, just live a nice life, where you can pay for nice things'. He even sounds like Bascombe.
Yet whereas Ford's project is to show as much of America as he can in as much detail as he can, Markovits rarely more than namechecks the places Tom passes through. For a road trip novel, we see very little road. Tom instead spends his journey thinking, principally about his relationship with Amy, but also about his childhood, which was scarred by divorce. To what extent, he wonders, are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of our parents?
His college years are another preoccupation. In Denver he drops in on his old roommate, hoping to ask his advice about whether or not to leave Amy. Yet whatever intimacy they once had is now gone: 'I knew within five minutes that I wouldn't open up to him about anything.' So they play pool and drink another beer.
All the while Tom's health is rapidly deteriorating, a situation that injects a surprising amount of tension into the novel. He wakes up in the morning with his face swollen 'like a water balloon', experiences head rushes and palpitations; there's a network of broken veins on his chest 'like blue in cheese'. Yet whenever anyone suggests he see a doctor, he demurs. This is frustrating until we realise his refusal comes from a lack of self-worth: his guilt that Amy's personality might have been 'slowly eroded by long association with me'', as well as his disbelief that anyone still cares about him. Then it is devastating.
Novels of midlife disappointment have become Markovits's stock-in-trade over the past decade or so. He does them arguably better than anyone else. Yet I do miss the intellectual ambition of some of his early books, such as the 600-page The Syme Papers (2004) and his trilogy of metafictions about Lord Byron (2007–11). Then, it looked like Markovits was shaping up to be the next Philip Roth. Still, it would be impossible to read The Rest of Our Lives without pleasure. Fluently written and effortlessly wise about families and middle age, it tells a compelling story that packs a serious emotional punch. We can never have too many of those.