THE REST OF OUR LIVES: Ben Markovits
Summit Books : 13 January 2026 (US)Faber & Faber : 27 March 2025 (UK) (I’m using the UK edition)
Page Count: 239
First line: When our son was twelve years old, my wife had an affair with a guy called Zach Zirsky, whom she knew from synagogue.
Blurbed by:
Lucy Caldwell – (Numerous awards. No Booker nominations.)
Sarah Hall – (Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004 for THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO. Longlisted in 2009 for HOW TO PAINT A DEAD MAN. She has also served as a previous Booker judge.)
THE REST OF OUR LIVES is British-American author, Ben Markovits, twelfth novel. Markovits grew up in Texas, London, and Berlin. He studied at Yale and Oxford. After college, he played professional basketball in Germany. Like some of the other nominees, he was selected as one of the Best Young British Novelists by Granta. (2013) He currently teaches creative writing in London.
Don’t Judge a Book…..
Here we have the case of two covers that I equally enjoy – and neither actually does the book justice. I get it – it is a cross-America road trip so both cover designers leaned into that. I can’t help but wonder if that’s the only part of the brief the designers were given because neither cover actually matches the book.
The UK edition is in fluorescent orange and pink with a rear view mirror in the center. The silhouette of a boy and girl and the sun either setting or rising is reflected from the backseat. I could make the argument it’s intentional – that it’s a setting sun on Tom’s life as a father now that his son and daughter are both grown. On the edges of the rearview are the silhouettes of a what is likely supposed to be Tom and his wife. The steering wheel is in the bottom corner. It’s a perfect family road trip. While the novel touches on that family unit, it’s really more focused on Tom’s midlife crisis. It’s an appealing cover and it does feel like a Midwest road trip, but Tom was alone for his journey – alone with the ghosts and regrets of days past.
The US edition is even more of a misrepresentation. It’s cute, with the blue sky, puffy clouds and red dirt. It’s wicked cute. But again, it doesn’t fit the novel of a 55-year-old man on a road trip across America who stops to shoot hoops and chase his own broken dreams while his body keeps trying to quit on him. Tom did not go off-roading. Tom didn’t drive a SUV. His pasty, bloated body went swimming, slept in the car, became frightened of an indigenous girl, ate Subway, watched a baseball game, and played a little basketball before he ended up in a hospital. Sorry. Spoiler.
I understand why the designers leaned into the road trip, but the road trip really was just a mechanism to propel the story forward and never seemed fully developed. This is one of the books that I questioned its inclusion on the longlist, but the two covers would make excellent covers for different books.
“We were just voices, really, staring at the ceiling.” (46)
Ben Markvoits’s The Rest of Our Lives is a perfectly fine book. It’s well-crafted and well-written. It has a beginning, middle and end. It has somewhat likeable characters. (And yet again, another professor involved with a student.) Our narrator is an unhappy 55-year-old white dude having a mid-life crisis, and he decides to take us along for the ride. There are some interesting things related to ethnic relations (in particularly in athletics but also with Tom’s Jewish wife), but they just seem to get lip-service without really peeling back any layers.
When preparing to take his daughter to college, Tom remembers that 12 years ago he’d promised himself he’d leave his wife when Miri turned 18 because his wife had an affair. Twelve years of resentment and a toxicity later, the family is on its last leg. Tom knows it, but I’m not much sure he cares to fix it. His job is broken. Again, I’m not much sure he cares. He fondles some old abandoned dreams of writing, remembering his plan to travel and play pickup basketball games and write about the strangers he meets along the way. He stumbles into a half-hearted attempt at chasing his dreams while taking a road-trip down memory lane – meeting up with old friends, old girlfriends, even his brother along the way.
Best part of the novel? The Cleveland section. The Guardians game at the bar was a snapshot in time that captured the heart of Cleveland and the boys of summer. Tom’s pickup basketball game with the guy from Cleveland Clinic was also well done. “God gives you symptoms for a reason,” the young man tells him. Tom doesn’t listen, but Markovits has hit us so repeatedly over the head about something clearly being wrong with Tom that we know the road trip will end at a hospital.
While the novel ends waiting on the results of a biopsy, unsurprisingly the family has knit itself together around Tom’s health scare – his mid-life crisis of faith effectively becoming a health crisis of uncertainty.
It’s a perfectly fine book.
A Girl Named Tommi 