A great part of the pleasure of Markovits’s latest book lies in the clarity and efficiency with which the narrator Tom (a middle aged law professor whose air of detachment elicits mixed reactions from, but doesn’t exclude real warmth for, his family) distills the kinds of things — relationships, life transitions — that obsess/mystify neurotics like me. For example, of his wife:

Amy had highly developed guilt feelings, which were so strong she couldn’t help being mad at whoever she felt guilty toward. Which was often me.

…and of trying to write/his abortive phd:

It was like grad school again, when I tried to churn out my dissertation on Updike and realized, I don’t want to write about other people’s experiences or ideas of the world, I want to have my own; but I didn’t really want to do that either. I just wanted to sit around and read books for the rest of my life.

(Of course, he ended up in law school.)

What makes The Rest of our Lives poignant is how Markovits explores the tension between Tom’s slightly disinterested, and also slightly sad, perceptiveness and aspects of his life that remain knotty, opaque (not least, his own body).

This tension is sort of encapsulated in the titular phrase, whose breeziness (and archness?) belies a range of associations that become relevant at various points as Tom drops his daughter Miri off at college and then…keeps on driving across the US: domesticity and its discontents (spending “the rest of our lives” together can be romantic or at least reassuring, and it can also be miserable, but what would you really do without the other person?), the uncertainty of the future, the unrealized futures one once imagined (or assumed to exist) for oneself, and of course the fact that life will come to an end.

There’s also a plot line that has to do with “cancel culture”/ the perilous zone between being a more or less ok white guy and aligning with racist reactionaries. This aspect of the book felt kind of on the nose to me, but maybe it would also feel kind of inauthentic if it didn’t come up at all in the (contemporary American) context? I’m not entirely convinced, and I also don’t think this is the best of Markovits’s books (Weekend in New York and Playing Days are better), but I’m really glad he seems to be reaching a wider audience.

Rest of Our Lives

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