{"id":116706,"date":"2025-10-12T04:10:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T04:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/116706\/"},"modified":"2025-10-12T04:10:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T04:10:11","slug":"the-rest-of-our-lives-is-a-dull-journey-with-a-middle-aged-man-on-a-road-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/116706\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Rest of Our Lives\u2019 is a dull journey with a middle-aged man on a road trip"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Rest of Our Lives<\/a> starts with the protagonist, Tom Layward, admitting to being cheated on by his wife twelve years ago. He introduces the other man and lays out the reasons for his wife\u2019s infidelity \u2013 all ultimately boiling down to a misstep, an affair that his wife Amy never really wanted, evident in how short-lived it was (only three months). Amy comes clean to Tom \u2013 she has \u201chighly developed guilt feelings\u201d \u2013 but instead of a clean slate, the writing has been sloppishly rubbed off, leaving imprints that superimpose themselves on every memory of the past and visions of the future.<\/p>\n

Author Ben Markovits establishes Tom\u2019s defeat from the word go. He is resigned to fate and middle age. The marriage is \u201cC minus\u201d and even aiming for a \u201cB plus\u201d life is an ambition that has little chance of fulfilment. Tom\u2019s resignation is understandable \u2013 he has never really come to terms with his wife\u2019s affair and after long years of bringing up the children (the son is in college and the daughter is preparing to leave the nest), he finally reckons with his feelings. Nothing is right at home, and his disappearance, or going on a road trip, will make little difference to Amy or their marriage.<\/p>\n

On the road<\/p>\n

So far so good. I was reminded of Miranda July\u2019s provocative novel All Fours<\/a>, which I read a few months ago.<\/p>\n

However, unlike All Fours, which makes a case for its middle-aged protagonist\u2019s lunacy very convincingly, The Rest of Our Lives gives up almost immediately.<\/p>\n

The initial part of the novel displays great promise. I\u2019m not dismissive of the White Man\u2019s feelings or whatever their midlife crisis might be but it is hard to sympathise with someone who seems to have made his mission to be miserable. Besides the affair which hits him badly, the only other thing that Tom seems to be suffering from is boredom. And yet, he is not bored \u2013 or at least energetic \u2013 enough to do something really exciting. A professor of law and chagrined as a low-ambition guy, this could\u2019ve been his chance to show his wife what he really could be. There are some vague legal complications Tom gets himself into but the author prevents Tom was messing with the law.<\/p>\n

Tom thinks of dedicating the children-are-gone phase of his life to writing a book about playing basketball around the country and the people he meets on the courts. While he does shoot the hoop whenever he can, he doesn\u2019t strike up a single interesting conversation! I struggled to understand why Markovits would saddle his protagonist with literary ambitions. These conversations could have been insights into the \u201cmale loneliness epidemic\u201d and white masculinity; however, all I found were intellectually starved, podcast-like dialogues. Sample this: \u201cI never had a problem you couldn\u2019t solve by going to the gym.\u201d Even at its most uninspired, this is not a sentence I would expect to read in a Booker Prize-shortlisted novel. Tom\u2019s book is a dud before he has started writing it.<\/p>\n

Even the \u201croad trip\u201d bit of the novel \u2013 happily highlighted in the blurb \u2013 is not given adequate attention. There are some sweet moments Tom shares with his daughter as he drives her off to college, but once she\u2019s dropped off, Markovits struggles to keep Tom\u2019s adventurous spirit. We do not meet any interesting characters, there are no stories or accidents, and the road becomes no one \u2013 Tom could\u2019ve flown everywhere, or worse still, set up Zoom calls with no injury to this subplot.<\/p>\n

Where to?<\/p>\n

He does not even think to sleep with his single ex-girlfriend when he turns up at her home on the trip. She graciously offers to pull out the sofa bed for him, takes him out with her friends, and even broaches the topic of sex. She decides she\u2019s too tired for it and he assures her that sleeping with her was never the intention. Though, of course, it is possible to have perfectly platonic relationships with your exes, one has to wonder what the point of the detour vis-\u00e0-vis the plot might have been. The reader comes back with nothing, except perhaps that Tom might have had a happier marriage with another woman \u2013 a fantasy that holds little opportunity in the story and which could have been true for any unhappily married character.<\/p>\n

I was also confused about Tom\u2019s politics. The \u201cfriends\u201d he meets on the road are rarely that \u2013 he had lost touch with most of them and when they resurface in his life after all these years, their relationship is defined by salaries and degrees, cribbing about expensive lunches, having illicit affairs with their students, or believing that the NBA is discriminatory towards its white players. Tom takes their concerns lightly and sort of stands up against the mad NBA rant \u2013 but what I failed to grasp is his own politics.<\/p>\n

He barely says anything, though his daughter\u2019s taunts about him being an Angry White Male prick him. The assortment of friends is obnoxious and ignorant, and Tom makes strange comments about thinking of himself as \u201clower-middle class\u201d (he isn\u2019t) \u2013 he quickly corrects himself as being a son of a \u201cwhite collar\u201d worker and despite that, too, he\u2019s married into wealth (Amy has a \u201cpot of inheritance\u201d). His convictions are hard to pin down \u2013 he\u2019s leaning \u201cwoke\u201d but never really contradicts his friends or stands up for his beliefs. Might he be a centrist or a people pleaser? One has to wonder\u2026<\/p>\n

A small element of suspense runs through the novel \u2013 a strange ailment that causes Tom\u2019s face to swell to grotesque proportions through the night. It\u2019s at its worst in the morning, with the swelling gradually going down by noon. Tom brushes it off as long COVID and insists that the doctors have assured him all is fine. The health issues, which suddenly come into focus, give a feeling that Markovits has belatedly decided to do something about them. The rush of information and the sudden, overwhelmingly emotional tone feel so out of place that the two halves of the novel seem to be jaggedly sewn together.<\/p>\n

The complaint that recurs in the novel is that of middle age. Tom chalks up his health and emotional ailments to it, and in some of the more defining scenes in the plot, we find Tom grappling with his body, rather than only the limitations of it. These inadequacies are magnified to such effects that I was surprised when Tom\u2019s age was revealed to be 55 \u2013 by today\u2019s standards, and by all accounts, it\u2019s still considered young!<\/p>\n

The detached tone of the first half lulls the reader into a disinterested state, making it that much harder to care about the drama that springs up (unpleasantly like a jack in the box!) in the second half. The reconciliation with his neurotic wife, unconcerned son, and absent daughter is so sudden and unexpected that it creates an impression that the author was no longer interested in his protagonist and wanted to wrap up his story as quickly and conveniently as possible. The diagnosis \u2013 quite serious too \u2013 has almost no emotional impact on Tom, and as a reader, I couldn\u2019t see why I had to worry about someone who isn\u2019t moved by his own mortality. It\u2019s unfortunate that Tom lives \u2013 death would have been a kinder fate.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Rest of Our Lives, Ben Markovits, Faber and Faber.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Rest of Our Lives starts with the protagonist, Tom Layward, admitting to being cheated on by his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116707,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[71538,71540,71537,18196,359,27206,18,117,19,17,71539,71536,71535],"class_list":{"0":"post-116706","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-2025-booker-prize-shortlist","9":"tag-ben-markovits","10":"tag-ben-markovits-the-rest-of-our-lives","11":"tag-booker-prize","12":"tag-books","13":"tag-books-and-ideas","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-ireland","18":"tag-road-trip-novels","19":"tag-the-rest-of-our-lives-ben-markovits-review","20":"tag-the-rest-of-our-lives-review"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}