Ben Markovits, ‘The Rest of Our Lives’ (2025)

Rabbit, Tom

[Continuing my read-through of the 2025 Booker longlist: previously on this very stack: thoughts on Katie Kitamura’s Audition, Natasha Brown’s Universality, Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper, and David Szalay’s Flesh]

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Reviewing a book written by a friend traditionally entails a ‘full disclosure’ admission. This is a personal blog, not a regular reviewing platform, and what follows is not really a review, but I will start by noting that Markovits is both a colleague and a friend of mine. This fact situates me peculiarly reading the novel, since I recognized certain elements in the story from its author’s life. Markovits has drawn on his own experiences for his fiction before: most notably, in his great novel Playing Days (2010), which is a fictionalized version of his time as a professional basketball player—I say fictionalized, although it’s not wholly clear how much is fiction. The main character of Playing Days is called Ben Markovits and much of the novel cleaves closely to the actual trajectory of Markovits’s career and life. How much of this is fiction and how much memoir is a fine question (I talk about this here). In The Rest of Our Lives there are many, forceful differences between author and character: the novel’s protagonist is called Tom Layward, and he lives in America not, as Markovits does, the UK. Markovits is Jewish and his wife is not; in The Rest of Our Lives Layward is not Jewish (he’s Catholic) where his wife, Amy, is. Layward is an academic as is Markovits, but he teaches Law rather than Creative Writing. He has been suspended from his academic position—this is what gives him the time to go on the road-trip that constitutes the bulk of the text (we’re not told exactly why Tom has been suspended from his job, but early in the novel there’s an implication it has something to do with his attitude to what he conspicuously calls ‘transvesites’: ‘we’re supposed to add a line under our university emails which says he/his/him’ he tells another character, ‘which I refuse to do.’ [15]). Markovits is not and has never been suspended from his academic position. That said, again there are some key similarities between author and protagonist. Basketball is a big part of Markovits’ life. There’s a good deal of basketball in The Rest of Our Lives, and Tom’s ostensible reason for his road trip is that he wants to write a book about travelling the States playing basketball with the people he meets. And knowing Markovits as I do, there seemed to me a lot of him in Tom, not least the specifics of the illness that plagues Layward through the novel, the precise nature of which is revealed at the end as something from which Markovits has also suffered—though I am pleased to say he is now in remission, and healthy. Indeed, one small niggle I had was that translating (as it were) the protagonist’s illness from England to the US does not involve any relocation of medical NHS-security to US Breaking-Bad-style medical-expense, precarity and worry. But this is a small thing.

Markovits draws on real life because he is, as a writer, interested in the accurate fictional representation of real life, and writing from direct experience helps generate verisimilitude. At no point in The Rest of Our Lives does the Realitätseffekt flag: it is, as with Markovits’s other novels, superbly done throughout. And this is the real point of my full-disclosure, above: that I was distracted in ways a regular reader would not be by the fact that I know Ben—distracted by my personal knowledge into wondering if this or that detail was autobiographical when, really, this is a piece of fiction (for instance: I’m Head of Department at Markovits’ workplace, and did wonder if the novel was at some point going to give us a picture of Tom Layward’s university life, perhaps with his monstrously ugly, martinet and bullying Head of Department. I mean, it doesn’t, I can report: the novel isn’t interested in Tom’s university life).

One intertext stuck out for me, reading this book, and that was Updike. I say that, though Markovits is, in many ways, a very different writer to Updike. Stylistically he does not go in for the prose-Keatsian lushness and richness of description Updike does, and he’s not as fixated as Updike was on sex as such—there is a certain amount of sex in The Rest of Our Lives, but none of the penis-with-a-thesaurus business we get in Updike. But Markovits is as interested as Updike was in middle-class and upper-middle-class America (less so in blue-collar life), and in the quiddity of life-as-it-is-lived. Plus, of course, in the Rabbit books at least, Updike was very interested in basketball. Rabbit Angstrom was a basketball star at high school and still plays as an adult: Rabbit, Run opens with a vividly written basketball game, twentysomething Rabbit playing with a random kid he sees practicing in a streetside court. Rabbit at Rest, the last Rabbit novel (or penultimate: there’s another set after Rabbit’s death, dealing with his widow’s life) ends with Rabbit, now old and fat, repeating this scene: playing a couple of kids and having a fatal heart attack in the process.

In one sense The Rest of Our Lives reads like a flipped riff on Rabbit, Run. Flipped because in Rabbit, Run it’s Rabbit who cheats on his wife Janice, where in The Rest of Our Lives it’s Amy who has cheated on Tom. So: Tom drives his daughter Miriam to start college, and when he has dropped her off instead of driving back to his home he carries on driving, eventually making his way all the way from East to West coast of the USA, meeting various people—friends, contacts, strangers, old girlfriends, finally his son and his on-off girlfriend. Rabbit, Run also opens with its main character driving off, lighting out for the territories (after a long drive through the American hinterland, described in detail, he does return, but to a new arrangement in his personal life). To quote myself:

Rabbit, Run starts by Rabbit going home, taking a look at his wife Janice, pregnant with their second child in their poky apartment, realising he can't stand any of it and just going. A bravura 25-page episode sees him get in his car and just driving away, looping round through small-town east-coast America. This running-away is unplanned and directionless, so Harry eventually makes his way back to his home, in Brewer, Pennsylvania (not, though, before imparting to the reader a sense of the scale of America, its topography of endless tiny town and vast intervening spaces). He doesn't return to his wife, though; instead he stays with his old basketball coach, through him meeting Ruth, a single woman and part-time prostitute with whom later Harry moves in. His pastor tries to broker a reconciliation with Janice, but for much of the novel Rabbit stays with Ruth. There's lots of ecstatic sex, which, even more so than their running, is of course what rabbits are famous for. Though 1950s publishing wasn't ready to put out a novel entitled Rabbit, Fuck I suppose.

In one sense Markovits expands this opening 25-pages into his whole 225-page novel. Tom drives and keeps driving.

In terms of Markovits’s style, Tom as first-person narrator (the Rabbit books, of course, are told in the third-person) is plain, clear, direct where Updike is flowery and circumlocutory. The narrator of Markovits’s earlier You Don’t Have To Live Like This (2015) opens with this self-effacing paragraph:

When I was younger I was never much good at telling stories. If I scored a goal at Pee Wee soccer, which didn’t happen often, I used to try and describe it for my brother over the hot dog and potato chips. Then he kicked it there and I ran here and he passed it to me there. My brother called these my “this and then this and then this” stories. I don’t know that I’ve gotten any better at it.

This is somewhat like Othello opening a monologue with ‘rude am I in my speech …’ before going on to demonstrate extraordinary eloquence and brilliant oratory, for You Don’t Have To Live Like This is very much more than a ‘this and then this and then this’ story, and is vividly and vibrantly told. But it gets at something in Markovits’s praxis as a stylist: a consecutiveness and directness to him telling what he is telling. The Rest of Our Lives is written like this.

The novel is about a number of things, but primarily about two. One has to do with the breakdown in the narrator’s marriage. The first sentence of the novel is: ‘when our son was twelve years old, my wife had an affair with a guy called Zach Zirsky, whom she knew from synagogue’. Amy tells Tom about the affair soon after it happens, and they decide to stay together for the sake of their children. ‘But,’ Tom adds, ‘I made a deal with myself. When Miriam [their youngest child] goes to college, you can leave too.’

Maybe this was just another one of those illusions, but it helped me get through the first few months after Amy told me about Zach, and for the sake of the kids we had to pretend everything was fine. When in fact what we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than B overall on the rest of your life. [3]

Tom drives Miriam off for her first day at university and then—he just keeps on driving. The second thing the novel covers, as mentioned above, is the fact that Tom is ill, and increasingly, unignorably so as the story unfolds. What this illness is, and whether Tom will divorce Amy or get back together with her, are the two narrative hooks that keep us reading. Although mostly what keeps us reading is the extraordinarily varied, well-rounded and believable characters Markovits creates. This is one of his great skills as a writer: not just making fully alive, rounded people, but so many of them, so efficiently and deftly, plus filling out their group interactions and dynamics, absolutely involving and believable. Perhaps his masterpiece as a writer is the pairing of linked novels A Weekend at New York (2018) and Christmas at Austin (2019), a group story that merits comparison with one of Rembrandt’s big multi-portrait canvases. And because Markovits draws his characters so well, the end of this novel—will Tom get back together with Amy? Does she want him back—can be deduced, even though it isn’t spelled out. (Sidebar: it always bothered me that John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman [1969] ends the way it does, with two alternate endings—one in which the two main characters separate, and another in which they get back together—offered to the readers as a pick-your-preference. If Fowles had done his job properly as a writer, and actually characterized his characters, rather than leaving them blank ciphers, then you as a reader would have a sense of what they would be likely to do. The equal balancing of this double ending only ‘works’ because the two individuals aren’t really characters. That’s not the case in The Rest of Our Lives).

The novel’s title, I realised belatedly, has a double meaning, referring both to the time-period that stretches before a married couple as the last of their children leaves home to attend college; but also referencing to the idea of that couple taking a break from one another, having a rest from marriage for a time—with this second meaning stretching into the sense of impending death implied by Tom’s illness, the ‘rest’ in R.I.P, the ‘rest’ to which Updike refers in his last Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest.

It is, in case I’m not making it clear, a marvellous novel, easily the best of the 2025 Booker longlist I have read (though I haven’t yet read them all). It not flawless. One subplot, about race, isn’t fully developed or integrated into the whole. A friend contacts Layward to ask his professional, legal help in a class-action lawsuit: a white basketball player called Todd Gimmell is suing about what he considers the racial discrimination against white players in the NBA. Tom drives into Los Angeles to meet this player: ‘he wore a gray T-shirt that said PROVE ME WRONG on the back. The front said KOBE WAS A RAPIST in bright red letters’ [181], which gives us a sense of Gimmell’s attitude. ‘I didn’t want to be there,’ Tom tells us. Yet there he is. There’s an awkward scene in which, over a beer, Gimmell tells Layward that his black team-mates single him out because he is white, and that there is systematic prejudice against white players.

‘There are a lot of great white basketball players right now, but they all come from Europe. Do you know who the last white American all-star was? Brad Miller, twenty years ago. Explain that to me. If there isn’t something going on that’s a lot bigger than Todd Gimmell. Do you know how many white Americans play in the NBA right now? Of five hundred guys under contract, less than forty. Do you know what their average salary is? About six million dollars a year. You know what the league average is? Ten million. In any other business this would be a lawsuit waiting to happen.’ [185]

When Layward replies ‘maybe white guys just aren’t as good’ Gimmell shoots back: ‘how can you say that when the two best players in the world right now are white—Dončić and Jokić. From Slovenia, with a combined population of nine million people.’ But this element isn’t as fully integrated into the novel as its other elements: as if something fuller had been cut, or toned down. But the rest of the novel, the family portrait, the intergenerational dynamics, the unpacking of a not-very-good marriage, the wide-sweep sense of America from East to West coasts, and the developing dread of the increasingly grievous symptoms of Tom’s illness, are superbly done. A great novel.