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<\/a>John Steinbeck, Robert Pirsig, Jack Kerouac\u2014and 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\u2019s an eminently readable novel that deserves the Booker Prize nomination it received.<\/p>\n
Tom didn\u2019t 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,\u00a0he 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\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n
He also encounters landmarks from his past that reflect his present. He visits an old girlfriend who tells him \u201cYou don\u2019t really care about anything.\u201d\u00a0A conversation with a college roommate makes him realize \u201c\u2026you make a conscious decision about who you feel close enough to talk to,\u201d and his friend wasn\u2019t one of them. And in the face of s colleague he\u2019s advised, he sees \u201cunder his old face, the shape of someone more elderly starting to push through.\u201d\u00a0Markovits\u2019 writing is replete with these and other such keen observations.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cNobody tells you about what an intense experience loneliness is.\u201d\u00a0As 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2014and Ben Markovits, all authors of classic road trip books. The first three authors are well-known, of course, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1517,383,1519,1518],"class_list":["post-3441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literary-fiction","tag-ben-marokvits","tag-literary-fiction","tag-road-trip-books","tag-the-rest-of-our-lives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3441"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3443,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3441\/revisions\/3443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}