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Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
How to deal with a midlife crisis — get in a car and keep driving
The Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show has an unimprovably bleak line on the letdowns of ageing: 'Your expectations get ground down and down until finally you settle for a life that would have mortified you 20 years ago, but now seems like a blessed relief.' The literary exemplar of such stoical suffering is poor Stoner, the perpetually thwarted Midwestern academic in John Williams's 1965 novel of the same name. But what if Stoner escaped his failed marriage and professional disappointments and embarked on a road trip to California? That's more or less the setup of The Rest of Our Lives. Ben Markovits's 12th novel is a slim study of middle-aged ennui set on the US highway, scattered with its English-American author's familiar interests such
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits review – a quietly brilliant midlife roadtrip
Ben Markovits's quietly excellent new novel begins with the most mundane of middle-class crises. The book's narrator, 55-year-old law professor Tom Layward, is taking his youngest child to university. For Tom and his wife Amy, the major tasks of parenting are about to vanish in the rear view mirror. The question is: what's next? It's a moment of change and re-evaluation for any couple. But within Tom and Amy's marriage an unexploded bomb is ticking. Tom tells us in the first paragraph that, 12 years earlier, Amy had an affair. He managed his heartbreak by making a deal with himself that he would leave when his youngest went to college. Dropping his daughter Miri in Pittsburgh, Tom doesn't head back to Amy in New York. He drives west, stopping to see old friends and family members, weighing his next move and reflecting on his past. As he confides in the reader, telling us about his background and upbringing, his marriage and career, he comes gradually into focus: an intriguing blend of frankness and reserve, bemusement, disappointment, fatherliness and compassion. Though it seems to promise no fireworks, there's something compelling about the story he tells and the dramatic question that shapes it: will Tom make good on his promise to himself and leave the marriage? 'What we obviously had,' he tells us, 'even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.' Here and throughout, Tom addresses us in a voice that appears disarmingly plain-speaking. Yet it would be a mistake to take what he says at face value. What gives his dilemma poignancy is the reader's sense that Tom and Amy's marriage is complicated and many-sided. Alongside the layers of bitterness and disappointment, there's also love and understanding. Sleeping in unfamiliar beds along his journey, Tom finds himself talking to Amy in his head, but he refrains from ringing her. He tells himself: 'If you call Amy now the person you talk to will not be the person in your head, for whom you have these warm and simple feelings. It will be another person, who doesn't like you much these days, with whom you get into stupid arguments.' One of the publishing highlights of last year was All Fours, Miranda July's unsettling account of a middle-aged woman who feels compelled to upend the certainties of her marriage. The novel continues to rumble through the lives of readers who were touched by it; for some it was an invitation to emulate the drastic upheavals of the central character. I thought about July's novel a lot as I was reading The Rest of Our Lives; it felt like a quieter male counterpart. While some readers seem to have approached All Fours as a self-help book or a guide to perimenopause, it is really a unique narrative understanding of a human life in all its particularity. And this is what The Rest of Our Lives is too. Like All Fours, it focuses on the difficult middle passage in the life of its protagonist, as he tries to figure out who he has been, what parts of himself he has surrendered, and who he might yet become. We learn as much from Tom's encounters with other people as from what he tells us himself: we see that he's decent, trustworthy and can bond with strangers, but that he's also reticent, closed and disappointed. 'I forgot what you're like,' says an ex-girlfriend he looks up on his way across America. 'You don't really care about anything.' Like all the summary judgments in the book, this is not accurate, but you understand how Tom gives this impression. And you sense how frustrating it would be to be in a relationship with him – a feeling that at any given time he's holding a great deal back. While this might make him an annoying spouse, as a prose stylist, it makes him exemplary. This is a literary novel whose great literary qualities are understatement and self-effacement. Here's Tom reflecting on his daughter's boyfriend: 'I liked him, but I also thought, in high school there's no way I'm friends with this kid.' Or, staying in a room that overlooks a river: 'Funny how the eye is drawn to water – it's just a very flat part of the view. But it shifts a little, slowly.' Or visiting a family friend: 'I was aware of being a dim presence in the background of the more vivid lives of children.' Or just waiting to go home at the end of an evening with his son: 'We were outside the restaurant now, standing on Sixth Street in the rough warm traffic-flavoured air.' Tom's usual restraint makes 'rough warm traffic-flavoured' shine like a jewel in a plain setting. The relaxed precision of the writing is one of the novel's pleasures. Another is the gradual unpacking of Tom's mind as we travel alongside him. And though the novel doesn't apparently offer much in the way of plot, it deploys its revelations very cleverly, with little sleights of hand that throw the story forward to its crisis and remind us that its ruminations and incidents are not random. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Tom, like Markovits, was a talented basketball player in his youth, and some of the novel's transcendent moments happen at pick-up games on courts he drops in on. Playing alongside an old friend, they turn up the heat on their opponents and Tom feels his powers return for a brief moment. 'You forget what it's like to play with somebody who really knows what he's doing,' he reflects. 'The world just opens up.' Markovits, too, really knows what he's doing. And it would be nice to think that the brilliant and unflashy naturalism of his novel will win many readers. The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits is published by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Tired of your marriage? Take this novel's advice
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.
The Guardian
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits review – a triumphant twist on the great American road novel
Ben Markovits's 12th novel opens with a confession. Its narrator, Tom Layward, a law professor, husband and father, tells us: 'When our son was 12 years old, my wife had an affair…' Tom makes a private pact to endure his marriage only until their six-year-old daughter, Miriam, leaves for college. It is a quiet, bitter calculus, the sort of grimly rationalised fatalism that pervades the book. 'What we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage,' Tom reflects, 'which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.' Markovits is an artist of such scorching recognitions – wry, unsentimental summations that make you wince at their truth. Then, with the turn of a paragraph, 12 years evaporate. Miriam is 18, the family is summering at her mother's parents' house in Cape Cod, and Tom's long-planned departure hangs over the novel like an unbroken storm. Markovits is superb at conjuring the temperature of a failing marriage – not through eruptions, but through the long accumulation of slights, hesitations and rehearsed hostilities. Tom's wife, Amy, is masterfully drawn: brittle, commanding, a woman who has long since learned the tactical advantages of exasperation. The novel's brilliance lies in how it refuses to reduce her to an antagonist – because, of course, Tom is just as complicit. Yet Tom has more than just his marriage to reckon with. He is besieged – by the lingering, shifting symptoms of what appears to be long Covid ('palpitations, sudden fatigue… I woke up with a swollen face and leaky eyes'), by a professional implosion at his unnamed university, where his refusal to include pronouns in his email signature has made him a lightning rod for campus politics. Worse, he has provided legal counsel to the owner of a basketball team accused of racism and sexism. He is, in short, on the losing end of a culture war battle he has neither the stomach nor the conviction to fight. With all of this in the air, he and Miriam set off to drive her to college in Pittsburgh. After dropping her, and seemingly on a whim, Tom just keeps on driving. His ostensible destination is California, where his son, Michael, is studying, but the journey is less a road trip than an act of attrition. He drifts through the wreckage of his past, stopping to visit old lovers, old friends, a brother, a business associate who ropes him into yet another consulting job in the ongoing ideological skirmishes of the NBA. If the great American road novel has traditionally been a narrative of youth – of possibility, of the US as something to be sought – then The Rest of Our Lives is its weary, middle-aged inversion. Tom is not discovering the US; he is retreating into it, moving not toward freedom but toward the inescapability of consequence. Hemingway said he wrote best about Michigan when he was in Paris. Markovits, too, has spent much of his life outside the US – he played professional basketball in Germany, and now teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London – but remains one of the most astute novelists of modern America. The Rest of Our Lives is another quiet triumph, an elegant, devastating book that lays bare the way time calcifies our failures, how we find ourselves trapped not by circumstance but by the slow erosion of the will to escape. Markovits has long been one of our most under-appreciated novelists; this is yet more proof that he deserves far greater recognition. The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits is published by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
