The Rest of Our Lives is a 2025 novel by Ben Markovits. The novel tells the story of 55-year-old law professor Tom Layward, who is disgruntled and unhappy with his life. Upon dropping off his daughter to college in Pittsburgh, he decides to take a cross-country road trip rather than going home to his wife in New York City.
The novel was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. The judges called it an unforgettable work about the challenges of marriage.[2]
Narrative
Tom Layward, a 55-year-old law professor from New York City, has just dropped his daughter Miri off at university in Pittsburgh. Rather spontaneously, he decides to travel across the United States instead of returning to his wife in New York. Layward's wife Amy had an affair 12 years ago, and Tom made a promise to himself that he would leave his wife once their children had moved out of the house. Tom is also unhappy with his life and without fulfillment. He describes himself as being in a C-minus marriage, which will only give him the opportunity of a B-grade life. He was recently placed on administrative leave by the university due to a series of violations. He refused to use him/her preferred pronouns on his e-mail signature line and he provided legal advice to an NBA team owner who is in the public spotlight after making racist and sexist comments. These transgressions cause him to be vilified at the university. His students petition for his removal. To add to his misfortunes, he has an unknown, yet lingering medical condition that causes palpitations, fatigue, and intermittent facial swelling.
Tom drives across the United States, visiting old friends, an ex-girlfriend, and a former business partner; and also interacting with strangers. He eventually reaches California where he visits his son Michael, and plans to visit his father's grave. When Tom was younger, his father had left his mother.
Reception
Writing for The Guardian, Marcel Theroux favorably described the novel as the male version of Miranda July's All Fours; he said the conversational, straightforward prose of Tom's narration is "relaxed precision writing" that is one of the novel's delights.[3] Also in The Guardian, Alex Preston wrote that the novel's brilliance is in its depiction of Amy not as a one-dimensional anatagonist but as a nuanced, "masterly drawn" character with complex motivations and beliefs. He described the work as an innovative take on the road novel, underpinned not by optimism but by the protagonist's pessimism.[4] In The Times Literary Supplement, Philip Womack called Markovits a master of detailing the complexities of family dynamics and said the marriage of Tom and Amy is shown "beautifully, in all its subtle tones".[5]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
