Ben Markovits’s Booker-shortlisted novel, The Rest of Our Lives, is a sharp, introspective take on the white male midlife crisis, told through a road trip that becomes both literal and metaphorical. The novel explores guilt and vanity with an honesty that can feel uncomfortable. Markovits revisits familiar American literary terrain of the disillusioned man on the move, but does so with a self-awareness that tests the reader’s empathy as much as his protagonist’s.
It tells the story of Tom Layward, a law professor, who once dreamed of becoming a writer. When he finds out that his wife, Amy, had an affair, he decides to leave her once his youngest child, daughter Miri, goes off to college. Twelve years later, as he drives Miri to a university in Pittsburgh, he remembers this pact that he made in a moment of hurt pride and sexual vanity. After dropping off Miri, he decides to take a road trip. He keeps on driving west, with a vague plan to visit various people along the way: his ex-girlfriend, younger brother, an old college friend, and possibly his son, Michael. At the beginning of the book, Tom is suffering from mysterious symptoms of what he suspects is long Covid, and by the end of the book, he gets diagnosed with a terminal ailment.
Tom is trying to escape the weight of the decisions he made years ago, and what better than the vast American highway for a road trip to go nowhere. The direction is away from home in New York. He is trying to figure out what the rest of his life could look like, away from the trappings of marital strife and domesticity. On his road trip, he decides to write a book. The idea is to travel and play pickup basketball on different courts, and write about the people he meets there.
Using first-person narrative, Tom states that he has been put on a leave of absence owing to inappropriate remarks he made while teaching a class on hate crime. To make things worse for his public image, he is legally involved in the defense of an NBA team owner accused of racial and gender discrimination. Tom’s son Michael says Tom is on the wrong side of history, while his daughter calls him an ‘angry white male’. In both instances, Tom doesn’t resist the classification. He goes on rants and ramblings, saying things he might not have said to a room full of people. Many of these statements are accompanied by justifications such as, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound about it the way I probably sound.” Sample this: “You spend your life as a guy getting slammed for objectifying women, and then you have a daughter and you’re supposed to stand back and let her spend however long she wants in front of the bathroom mirror, basically turning herself into an object.” Tom believes that his daughter is turning herself into an object for male attention when she is merely dressing up and accessorising, as many teenagers ordinarily do.
John Updike and Philip Roth are among Markovits’s literary heroes. Markovits’s protagonist is, at one point in the novel, trying to write a dissertation on Updike. Additionally, in an interview with the Booker Prize committee, Markovits talks about Roth’s influence on his work. Feminist critics have observed that both Updike and Roth often wrote primitive female characters. Their dominant narrative was one of the white male gaze. Both authors represent a bygone era of white male literature which female readers found unpalatable. The reader may find traces of this influence in Markovits’s writing. For instance, Tom claims that Amy confessed to her affair because she wanted to share her guilty feelings with someone. However, we later find out that Amy was pregnant, and it was unclear whose child it was. She wanted to keep the child, but she suffered a miscarriage soon after. It was in the aftermath of this miscarriage that she confessed to having an affair. Through Tom, Markovits is oversimplifying Amy’s pain and confusion.
“We’re supposed to add a line under our university emails, which says like, he/his/him, which I refuse to do. So I got an email from the compliance officer.” Tom and other professors at his university have been asked to add pronouns to their emails. In Markovits’s book, white males have a peculiar rebellion going on where the biggest obstacles they face are declaring their pronouns and fighting against diversity and inclusion. They also blame the sensitivity of youth for jeopardising their public image.
That being said, Markovits is at his sharpest when writing about human relationships. The Rest of Our Lives, while intense and readable, is bound to get mixed reactions from the female readership. Even as the novel may sometimes feel like the story of the meltdown of a white middle-aged man, at its heart, it is a deep exploration of ideas concerning family and friendships.
