The Rest of Our Lives (2025)

Why this one?

The 2025 Booker shortlist was announced last week. I was pleased to see The Land in Winter and Flesh on there, very pleased to see Universality NOT on there and (like many) somewhat distraught at the omission of the magnificent Seascraper. As I’d only read just under half of the longlist, I’m generally happy that there are a few more for me to check out before I move on for another year. Four to be precise. Here’s the first of those…

Benjamin Markovits (1973- ; active 2004-) was born in Palo Alto, California and spent his youth in a variety of locations including Texas, London, and Berlin. He studied literature at Yale and went on to complete an MPhil at the University of Oxford. Following his studies, he pursued a career as a professional basketball player in Landshut, Germany, a period that later informed his 2010 novel, Playing Days. He currently lives in London, has two children, and teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Markovits' first novel, The Syme Papers, was published in 2004. He is particularly noted for his trilogy of novels about the life of Lord Byron: Imposture (2007), A Quiet Adjustment (2008), and Childish Loves (2011). In 2013, he was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists (he has dual British-American citizenship). His novel You Don't Have to Live Like This won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2016. The Rest of Our Lives is his twelfth novel and first to make the Booker shortlist. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

Thoughts, etc.

The Rest of Our Lives focuses on the 50-something law professor Tom Layward, based in New York with his wife Amy and about to see their youngest child Miri off to college in Pittsburgh. We learn early on in the novel that Amy had cheated on Tom over a decade ago, at which point he had privately vowed to leave her after their children had both left home. As they prepare for Miri’s departure, both experience some degree of ‘empty nester’ anxiety and Amy decides to stay home rather than face the emotional trauma first-hand.

After dropping her off, instead of heading home Tom decides to drive West, beginning an unplanned road trip across the US. On top of dealing with his long-held commitment to leave Amy, we also learn that Tom has recently put on enforced leave from his job due various controversies, and also that he is dealing with health issues, initially dismissed by doctors as untreatable manifestations of ‘long Covid’, which has put him off from further visits. On the road, Tom visits a succession of characters from his past, including a former colleague, an old college friend, an ex, and his son Michael in LA.

As well as these characters from his past, a former interest in basketball looms large over the trip, with Tom frequently stopping off to play pick-up games on neighbourhood courts, taking photographs with the vague intention of writing a book about the culture around pick-up basketball. Another connection to the sport is through a recent engagement providing legal counsel to NBA team-owner accused of racism and sexism. Via his stop-off with an old colleague, he is unwilling led to a meeting with another protagonist in this dispute, who rants at him about the perceived barriers to success for white players of the game in the US.

I have to admit that this one perplexed me somewhat. I’d already passed it over both as an ARC and when sampling from the longlist as it sounded pretty uninspiring in terms of plot, and longlist reviews were pretty mixed to say the least. And for much of the book I felt like this reservation was justified. I really had a strong sense of deja vu throughout, feeling like I’d read this story before. A middle aged man on a road trip; having a mid-life crisis; relationship and family discontent; some kind of American sport fixation. You get the idea, right? For the most part this is all you get from The Rest of Our Lives. Very little feels fresh or like it’s offering a new perspective.

There are a few exceptions that lift it slightly. It’s very firmly situated in the present day, in the shadow of Covid and (more importantly) in a divided America in which we meet some (white, male) characters who are aggrieved by their perceived diminishment in society in the modern era. While Tom doesn’t actively participate in this line of argument, he is clearly at the very least comfortable to professionally defend similar characters (putting his career at risk in the process) and his reaction to the direct confrontation with the basketball dude moaning about his sporty take on replacement theory is little better than a shrug of the shoulders. While raising these kind of important contemporary issues made the book marginally more interesting, it might have had a little more impact if it was presented as more than background noise to Tom and he participated more actively in the debate.

The other thing that lifts the book is the retrospective view of it presented by the conclusion. It’s revealed fairly late on that Tom’s symptoms are serious (likely cancer; potentially terminal) rather than the minor inconveniences he presents them as. There is a clear hint that Tom is at the very least aware of the possibility of these symptoms being more serious, and has therefore in some sense been on the run from a final diagnosis, both in terms of having to face up to it himself and the impact it would have on his wife and children. The road trip takes on a slightly different context in this light, inviting a second reading in which some of Tom’s decisions (to withhold information, to ignore worsening symptoms, and even to disengage with the ‘noise’ of some of the debates going on in society) can be read differently.

The question, I think, in assessing how successful this book is in how much you are willing to forgive a largely uninspiring and occasionally frustrating first read on the basis that its ‘twist’ reveals some more interesting layers to think about. It’s one of those cases where the Booker jury’s need to read a contending book at least three times places them in a somewhat different position to the average reader, and perhaps explains its shortlisting over more immediately rewarding titles on the longlist. I’m personally not entirely convinced by this line of argument. I’m not really a re-reading type, and I don’t think the context provided by the conclusion in this case is sufficiently game-changing to change my mind here.

Score

6

It’s a perfectly adequate book, with moments of insight and some tricks up its sleeve that lift it above mediocrity, but to my mind not one that merits its place on a major 2025 fiction shortlist. Some have compared it to a ‘male All Fours’ which I found laughable - there’s nothing like the transgression, excitement and weirdness that you get from July’s book. And while it’s important that male stories continue to be told in major fiction, I don’t think (unlike, say, Flesh) this has anything genuinely new to say on the subject of masculinity.

Next up

I’m excited to finally embark on Kiran Desai’s epic The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.