Bob Moyer reviews a new novel that he believes is an “instant classic.”
Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer
THE REST OF OUR LIVES. By Ben Markovits. Simon & Schuster. 240 pages. $28.
John Steinbeck, Robert Pirsig, Jack Kerouac—and Ben Markovits, all authors of classic road trip books. The first three authors are well-known, of course, but Markovits has come up with an instant classic, without an animal, a motorcycle or a beat poet to be seen. Instead, he gives us Tom Layward, a middle-aged man on a forced leave from work, driving a middle-class sedan across middle America. It’s an eminently readable novel that deserves the Booker Prize nomination it received.
Tom didn’t mean to take a road trip. Although he had decided 12 years before when his wife had an affair to leave her when their youngest left the nest, he had almost forgotten. Then, when his wife decides to stay home when he takes his daughter, their youngest, to college, he drops the daughter off—and keeps driving. He drives through a landscape of Walmart parking lots, diners and playground basketball courts, where he uses a feeble excuse of researching a book, all to a soundtrack of Townes Van Sandt.
He also encounters landmarks from his past that reflect his present. He visits an old girlfriend who tells him “You don’t really care about anything.” A conversation with a college roommate makes him realize “…you make a conscious decision about who you feel close enough to talk to,” and his friend wasn’t one of them. And in the face of s colleague he’s advised, he sees “under his old face, the shape of someone more elderly starting to push through.” Markovits’ writing is replete with these and other such keen observations.
As he gets farther from home, his wife goes from being a voice on the phone, to a voice in his head, to silence. Deep in his trip, he realizes “Nobody tells you about what an intense experience loneliness is.” As he travels, he carries with him a physical affliction that blossoms by the time he gets to California to see his son; he ends his trip in the hospital. His wife arrives, and pushes him out of the hospital in a wheelchair, into the rest of their lives.