Tom Layward, the protagonist of The Rest of Our Lives, is not doing well. He is, at least ostensibly, a successful man: a man with a high-paying job, a beautiful wife, and two accomplished kids. Everything would be perfect if it weren’t for those pesky health problems he’s been ignoring for months, the forced leave he’s taking from his job, and of course, the reality of his crumbling marriage, which never recovered from the affair his wife had a decade ago.
In The Rest of Our Lives, Ben Markovits uses Tom Layward’s midlife crisis to examine the tension between the reality of America’s present and the ideals of its past. Those skeletons in Tom’s closet continue to haunt him, so when he drops his daughter off at college in Pittsburgh, he sees an escape route. Instead of returning home to Westchester, he just keeps driving. He makes like Jack Kerouac or Joan Didion — he goes West.
What follows is a coast-to-coast tour of Tom’s past. On his drive, he stays over at his younger brother’s apartment, his college ex-girlfriend’s home, and the mansion of an old friend. At each successive stop, what becomes clear is that at the heart of Tom’s midlife crisis is not a fear of aging; it’s a fear of the world he knows slipping away, a fear of being on uncertain ground. As he wends his way from one person to the next, Tom is confronted again and again with the ways in which the people of his past have either successfully changed or remained unhappy because of their inability to move forward.
That tension between past and present is what Markovits digs into so effectively. Tom’s life is worse because of his derision for today’s world. He’s chastised by his daughter for mocking the fact that he has to include pronouns in his work email signature. He has damaged his relationship with his son because of the legal advice he gave a racist basketball tycoon. Markovits slyly demonstrates the ways in which Tom’s inability to get with the times prevents him from showing up for his family and for himself. In the novel’s denouement, Markovits unearths the question: how far will Tom go to protect what he believes about the world, and how will his resistance to change impact the people he loves?
In today’s world, Markovits seems to say that resistance to change is not merely futile — it’s misguided and preservationist. It eschews intellectual engagement for pat talking points, and more than any of that, it profoundly impacts one’s ability to connect, to deepen relationships, and ultimately, to love.
Joshua Geller Schwartz is a marketing professional at a Jewish nonprofit and an obsessive Goodreads reviewer. He lives with his fiancé and his cat, Bubbeleh, in Brooklyn.
