“When our son was twelve years old, my wife had an affair with a guy called Zach Zirsky, whom she knew from synagogue.” Thus begins the alluringly poignant work by Ben Markovits. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, Rest of our Lives, unravels the complex layers of the human life and mind in a measured, muted, and matter-of-fact manner.
Tom Layward, a professor of law in his mid-fifties is driving his daughter Miri to Carnegie Melon. This event, in addition to shaping the career and future of Miri, also marks an inflection point in the life of Tom himself. Twelve years ago, his wife Amy confessed to having an affair – a fact which Tom himself informs his readers in the first couple of lines – because of which Tom convinces himself to leave Amy once their youngest child Miri gets to university. Instead of driving back home from Pittsburgh, Tom impulsively embarks on a drive west, with impromptu stops at the doorsteps of friends and family.
During the drive, Tom untangles the tapestry of his marriage that is an eclectic agglomeration of fantasy, frustration, frankness, bewilderment, attachment, detachment, and resignation. The vicissitudes of the characters in Tom’s life seep into, merge and coalesce with Tom’s own vagaries. The unpredictable nature of man finds full and non-judgemental expression in Tom’s extraordinary narration.
Finding himself in alien beds, Tom strikes up imaginary conversations with Amy. As the story progresses, it is evident that Tom’s predilection is to accept positions that are neutral, vacillating and fence sitting. Abhorring controversies and confrontations, Tom always seeks assurance in silence preferring thought over word and deed. “At a certain age you start making conscious decisions about who you feel close enough to talk to, or maybe it’s just something you learn how to do, it doesn’t matter who with.” This proclamation epitomises Tom’s character in no small part. Thoughts trail off midway while words are left unspoken.
Playing pick up basketball at every opportunity – one of Tom’s unfulfilled ambitions took the form of authoring a book about pickup basketball in all its variants across America – with strangers and acquaintances, gives Tom uninhibited joy. It is as though Tom’s deepest feelings find their total and unhindered expression on the basketball courts. Allegories to basketball manifest in spontaneous and unexpected fashions. Tom’s secret of staying in a long marriage warrants acceptance of reduced expectations. “It’s like being a Knicks fan.”
Tom is also experiencing a peculiar physical phenomenon bordering on the disturbing. Every morning, he wakes up with a puffed, nay, bloated face. It takes the duration of the day for the swelling to completely subside. Tom’s personal physician after running a battery of tests, concludes that the symptoms are in all probability, attributable to Long COVID and despite the entreaties of the family, Tom refuses to get himself checked by a specialist. This syndrome keeps manifesting at regular intervals throughout Tom’s driven, causing more than just a bit of consternation amongst people witnessing the rare and unsavoury spectacle.
The Rest of Our Lives is more a mirror to one’s conscience than a manifesto of mid life crisis. It is the story of a soul that seeks happiness and craves contentment while finding itself in the eye of the storm in a life characterised by change and tumult.