In a break from his tetralogy about the Essinger family, and following on from The Sidekick (a kind of Humboldt’s Gift with basketball), Ben Markovits now takes us on a road trip across America. The Rest of Our Lives explores marital breakdown, betrayal, the empty nest and a myriad mid-life malaises, including life-threatening illness. It’s quietly enthralling and full of the small epiphanies that more maximalist writers wouldn’t deem worthy of notice.
When Amy Lanyard has an affair with ‘a guy called Zach Zirsky whom she knew from synagogue’, her husband Tom, a legal professor, vows to leave the marriage after their daughter Miri turns 18. Twelve years later, as he drives Miri to her first semester at university, with his job on hold, it’s time to find out whether he has the courage of his convictions. While his marriage ultimately turns out to be stronger than he thinks, Tom is drily sardonic about the realities of sustaining a relationship over decades:
If you continue to have illusions, that’s your fault… You stop expecting them to do or give you things you know perfectly well they’re unlikely to do or give you. It’s like being a Knicks fan.
After leaving Miri in Pittsburgh, Tom powers off his phone, buys a road atlas and just keeps driving, heading west to Des Moines. From there he begins an erratic journey across country via Las Vegas and eventually to LA, stopping off to visit his younger brother, a college girlfriend and a couple of old buddies with whom he breaks bread and shares some Coors beers before he’s roped in to giving legal counsel. But his act of emancipation doesn’t improve his mental health: ‘I felt very low. Homeless. Miri was gone… I had no job to go back to.’ And his physical health is no better. For quite some time he’s been suffering from what he suspects to be long Covid, with bouts of tachycardia. Despite this, he shoots hoops of basketball at every opportunity with friends or complete strangers, putting ever more strain on his beleaguered body.
Along the way we’re given a granular picture of the United States today, with its six-lane highways, diners, motels and malls. Although Markovits has lived and worked in the UK for decades, nobody does smalltown America like he does – its bars with ‘guys in trucker hats and women in shorts’, and buildings that resemble ‘dental offices’. There’s something about the indeterminacy of the landscape that mirrors Tom’s unmoored state of mind, his midlife tailspin. For much of the time he’s not even sure if his marriage is over: ‘I may have left Amy,’ he says more than once.
The crisis comes when he reaches the West Coast and stays with his son Michael, now in his mid-twenties. Much of Tom’s lament is bound up with children leaving home and how parents choose to spend the rest of their lives. ‘The kids need you and then they withdraw their need,’ he comments in a simple sentence that holds a world of pain. After an ocean swim with Michael and his girlfriend, Tom blacks out and is taken to hospital, where he discovers he’s more seriously ill than he’d anticipated. Indeed, the story of his deteriorating health throughout the book is as compelling as Rabbit Angstrom’s in John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest; his somatic decline echoing his waning sense of self.
Written in a disarmingly flat yet piercingly truthful voice, The Rest of Our Lives confirms Markovits as one of America’s premier writers. A slam dunk of a novel.
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