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).