THE REST OF OUR LIVES

"Nobody tell you what an intense experience loneliness is, how it has a lot of variations. Just hour by hour."

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, Ben Markovits has written a touching and perspective story about the passage of time and digesting of emotional material. What would happen if after dropping your youngest daughter at college, you got in your car and just drove, stopping in at old college friends, a relative, a basketball teammate and an ex girlfriend.

Tom teaches at the law school. However, an issue with a couple of students in his class on hate crime has resulted in a leave of absence. His relationship with his wife, Amy is strained, especially because Miri their youngest daughter is heading off to college. Added to this, Tom has been having episodes following a bout of covid causing him palpitations, sudden fatigue, swollen face and leaky eyes. Their elder son, Michael is at grad school in LA. Left to drop Miri at college on his own, on impulse he decides to keep driving and so begins a reflection on his youth, career choice, relationship with Amy and their kids as he crosses the States to arrive at his son’s flat in LA.

At various stop offs including old college room-mates, his brother, a basketball buddy and an ex-girlfriend he reflects on the ‘what ifs’ and the crossroads of his life. He wonders why he can no longer communicate with Amy and at what point this happened, was it when she had an affair which he knew about before she told him? He reflects on how his father leaving his mother impacted him very differently from his younger brother Eric and what if he had fulfilled his dream to write, one of his ideas being to write a book about pickup basketball. To this day he still liked to go to the field and shoot hoops for half an hour. However, at each stop, Tom finds he doesn’t want to be there, either because it is not what he expected or because it’s no longer what he wants.

Markovits draws you into Tom’s feelings of frustration and disappointments – is he trying to regain his youth? Is Tom unhappy, or is he just trying to fathom out whether he’s made the right choices? As the reader you feel Tom can’t understand what he’s trying to replicate. This is particularly poignant when he reaches LA and hears Michael on the phone late at night to his girlfriend, “It was the…. I don’t know how to describe it, the sharpest taste I’d had in years of what it feels like to be young” He refers to the old Paul Simon line, “I don’t expect to sleep through the night’ as he’s awake in the small hours.

LA is the culmination of his journey in more ways than one, and perhaps the reason he felt the need to use the drive to contemplate his life. Already we can see this being made into a film