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Journalism of Courage
In The Rest of Our Lives, Benjamin Markovits turns the well-worn road-trip trope into a meditation on male loneliness, aging, and the hollow hum of middle-class American life.
Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, the novel follows Tom Layward, a 55-year-old law professor whose marriage, career, and body are faltering. It is a trifecta of slow-motion collapse.
The novel opens with a confession, “When our son was twelve years old, my wife had an affair….” And, never entirely leaves that emotional terrain. As Tom drives his daughter Miriam to college in Pittsburgh, he recalls vow he made to himself long ago that once his daughter is grown, he will leave his wife, Amy.
But instead of returning home, Tom keeps driving westward, through the American landscape and through the craggy terrain of his own unease. The journey is as much psychological as physical, a series of elliptical encounters with family, old lovers, and his own past.
Markovits structures this as a drifting narrative, almost anti-plot and the journey substitutes for action. Tom’s drive, like the novel itself, is fueled by resignation. As he puts it, a “C-minus marriage” yielding, at best, a “B overall on the rest of your life.”
Markovits’s prose is deceptively plain, even prosaic. His sentences move without flourish but with the quiet authority of lived experience. He shares with John Updike, one of his intertexts, a fascination with middle-aged American malaise, though without Updike’s baroque sensuality or moral judgment. Where Rabbit, Run exulted in rebellion, The Rest of Our Lives sighs into fatigue.
Markovits writes expertly of the incremental corrosion of a marriage curdled by habit. “It still seemed amazing,” Tom reflects, “that this girl who once seemed too pretty for me had become this person with such complicated resentments and dependencies directed at me. I don’t think I was worth it.”
At its heart, the novel is about male loneliness, its self-inflicted wounds and its cultural invisibility. Tom is the kind of man who believes stoicism equals dignity, until it curdles into paralysis. His refusal to confront illness, career trouble, or emotional honesty make it a slow-burn tragedy.
Markovits, to his credit, does not sentimentalise him. Tom is flawed, often tone-deaf, sometimes cruel. Yet the author finds in his confusion, the dawning recognition that the life you built is no longer quite your own.
Critics have compared The Rest of Our Lives to a “flipped” Rabbit, Run, Amy’s affair replacing Rabbit’s, the journey unfolding inward rather than outward.
But where Updike’s America vibrated with erotic and religious intensity, Markovits’s is quieter claustrophobic. His America is not the land of endless reinvention but one of polite decay.
The novel’s title does double duty. It gestures toward the years left to Tom and Amy, but also toward the “rest” that comes at the end of life, the silence after the motion stops.
The Rest of Our Lives is a meticulously observed, often moving account of middle-aged drift and a reminder that literary fiction can find grandeur in inertia. Yet its restraint borders at times on suffocation. Markovits’s realism, for all its precision, can feel airless, its emotional palette muted to grayscale.
Still, this is Markovits at his most humane. It is a novel about the small humiliations that make up a life, the moral tremors beneath our routines, and the quiet hope that even in disappointment, something real can still be found.
