The Rest of Our Lives

by Benjamin Markovits

Literary

Contemporary

336 pages

"I couldn't stop thinking about Tom's drive long after I finished. The Rest of Our Lives captures midlife restlessness with such quiet, devastating honesty."

Synopsis

After dropping his daughter off at college, Tom Layward finally does something he's imagined doing for a dozen years: instead of driving home to his wife, he keeps going. The Rest of Our Lives follows this law professor as he sets out on an open-ended road trip across America, revisiting old haunts and reckoning with a marriage he's stayed in largely out of habit and unresolved resentment. As the miles accumulate, so do memories, of the affair his wife once had, of the choices that quietly calcified into a life, of the person he might have become had he chosen differently. Markovits renders Tom's interior world with unflinching clarity, neither excusing nor condemning him, simply following where his restlessness leads. It's a novel about the private math everyone does inside a long marriage, and what happens when someone finally stops doing the sums and starts driving. Spoiler-free, quietly unsettling, and deeply human.

Our Take

Benjamin Markovits has built a career writing intelligent, emotionally precise fiction, and The Rest of Our Lives might be his most accessible work yet. Its premise, a middle-aged man simply driving away from his life, sounds slight on paper, but the novel's power comes from how honestly it treats the accumulated grievances and compromises of a long marriage. Fans of Tom Perrotta's suburban discontent or Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe novels will recognize the terrain: a narrator whose interiority is both the point and the pleasure, someone whose ordinary crisis becomes compelling because of how carefully it's observed. Markovits writes with a restraint that never tips into melodrama; Tom's resentments are petty and human, his nostalgia unreliable, his self-justifications squirmy and recognizable. The road trip structure gives the novel forward momentum without sacrificing its interiority, each stop peeling back another layer of what kept Tom static for so long. There's a dry wit running underneath the melancholy, keeping the book from ever feeling like a slog through midlife malaise. Readers who loved Meg Wolitzer's marriage novels or the quiet devastations of Kent Haruf will find a kindred sensibility here. This is a book for readers who want their fiction to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it neatly, anyone drawn to novels about the gap between the life we imagined and the one we're actually living.

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