Tom Layward’s children are grown and his marriage is faltering, and so, like countless middle-aged heroes before him, he leaves. Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives deliberately echoes other literary chroniclers of male angst; Tom, who once pursued a PhD on the writer John Updike, also – like Updike’s hero Rabbit – plays basketball. However, while acknowledging the tradition to which it belongs, this brief novel contains an elegance entirely its own.
On the surface, there’s little unfamiliar about the story, treading as it does the territory of domestic disquiet. Much of Markovits’s fiction contains elements of his own experience: Markovits is half-Jewish and his parents were law professors; Tom is a law professor married to a Jewish woman. Tom’s wife has had an affair, he’s embroiled in a high-profile sports scandal and has some alarming health issues. It’s not that his world lacks drama, but he’s the kind of guy who, after collapsing in a hospital, notes, “By the time I opened my eyes again, I felt better.” Ultimately, we experience Tom’s melancholy through his academic diffidence. “What we obviously had,” he muses, “was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score higher than a B overall for the rest of your life.”
Tom, as he himself is aware, can be infuriating. “You don’t really care about anything,” an ex-girlfriend tells him. That he’s shrewd and funny makes him wounding. His stay-at-home wife, Amy, “has a lot of ideas about educational documentaries, where you basically have a captive audience, which is why the standard is low.” Amy may come off as tightly-wound, but imagine being married to a man who describes you as so “hemmed in by her ... poise that she has nothing new or interesting to say”.
The male psyche continues to be a source of fascination; unfortunately, some of its authors are so carried away by their own brilliance that they are exhausting. Markovits, on the other hand, makes it effortless for us to inhabit the character of Tom, in part because the prose and the character possess such a confidence they have no compulsion to show off. Reading The Rest of Our Lives provides the kind of absorbing pleasure that lets us forget its mastery. Tom’s life, as he views it, may be no big deal, but from it, Markovits has crafted a softly radiant jewel, and for that both men have our thanks.
