The Rest of Our Lives review: ‘It’s not clear why this novel should matter to anyone’

Over the past 20 years the British-American writer Benjamin Markovits has published a dozen novels and in 2013 was named as a Granta Best of Young British Novelists. Alongside spells in London he grew up in Texas and Germany, where he played professional basketball (the subject of one of his best novels, Playing Days, and a recurring theme in his new Booker longlisted novel, The Rest of Our Lives).

Tom Layward is in his mid-fifties and his marriage is on the rocks, ever since his Jewish wife Amy announced she had been having an affair with Zach Zirsky, whom she knew from synagogue. It’s a brief bit of Jewish drama in a rather flat goyishe novel. Tom is an East Coast lawyer from Scarsdale in Westchester. His son has moved to LA and his daughter, Miriam, is off to college in Pittsburgh. Neither seem very happy about themselves or their family. Much is said these days about the supposed crisis of the white male middle-class novel, stories of adultery and men living through mid-life crises.

The Rest of Our Lives is a classic example of such a novel. Tom takes to the road and drives across America, visiting old college friends, an old girlfriend and his son. “I’m just … a little adrift right now. I can’t seem to get a grip on anything,” he tells Amy. We are a long way from the two great generations of modern Jewish-American novelists, Bellow and Roth, followed by Foer, Kraus and Chabon. These writers took on big issues, bigger than the sub-Updike world of middle American marriages collapsing and parents wondering why they can’t get on with their kids. They tackled the collapse of the great American cities, the tragic Jewish past, the relationship between humour and sadness in Jewish-American writing. That’s why they mattered.

It’s not clear why The Rest of Our Lives should matter to anyone. In a time of international crisis and change, who needs a sad tale of suburban life, full of talk about sports, especially basketball, people who drink too much, worry about whether their marriages, past and present, will work out, and too many characters who get drunk and behave badly? They are bad husbands and wives, bad parents, and not very smart. At least not smart enough to reflect on how they got to where they are now. They don’t read interesting books, go to interesting films or have interesting ideas about the state of America. There is barely a single reference to Trump or the state of the Democrats, nothing about Israel or Ukraine. It’s all very small beer.