Midlife creeps up quietly, and so do the mistakes you’ve agreed to live with; The Rest of Our Lives solves the problem of how to narrate that quiet drama without melodrama—how to tell the truth about marriage, parenting, and the messy calculus of staying.
Benjamin Markovits turns a fading marriage and a late-life road trip into a gently devastating reckoning with love, guilt, and the stories we tell ourselves to keep going.
The novel’s first pages lay out the affair that scars the marriage—“my wife had an affair with a guy called Zach Zirsky, whom she knew from synagogue” and the narrator’s stunned pragmatism at a Purim food bank table—grounding the book’s realism in crisp, confessional detail.
Best for readers who savor character-driven fiction, nuanced domestic realism, and the midlife road novel; not for readers seeking twisty plots or high-concept spectacle.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
The Rest of Our Lives (Faber & Faber, hardback publication March 27, 2025; 256 pp.) is by Benjamin Markovits, the British-American author and Royal Holloway professor whose fiction often probes family life and moral ambiguity; The Rest of Our Lives was longlisted and later shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.
Markovits’s publisher describes the novel as “another quiet triumph,” and early press singled it out as a quietly brilliant midlife road trip, with multiple reviews emphasizing its restraint and emotional accuracy.
Crucially, the novel opens not with fireworks but with a confession—the voice of Tom Layward, a New York law professor, inventorying a betrayal and its aftermath with an almost forensic calm.
2. Background
As context, Markovits has long written about American life from a transatlantic vantage (Texas, London, Berlin), and his awards (James Tait Black) and shortlistings locate him at the center of contemporary literary realism.
Set initially in Westchester and Cape Cod before widening into a cross-country drive, the story leans on American institutions—the synagogue’s social orbit, a BookExpo-adjacent Jewish Book Council event at the Algonquin, college admissions stats, and the low hum of NBA scandal chatter—to build an everyday world that feels observed rather than arranged.
The background matters because the novel’s stakes are modest and therefore piercing: what does a decent man do with a “C-minus marriage” that he can neither repair nor abandon without damaging everything else.
3. The Rest of Our Lives Summary
Tom Layward, a mid-career New York law professor, begins his story with the calm shock of a confession: when their son was twelve, his wife, Amy, had an affair with Zach Zirsky, a gregarious, guitar-playing fixture at their synagogue who “wore linen shirts open at the chest,” danced with “old ladies and little pigtailed girls,” and seemed to have a friendly excuse for touching everyone—including Amy under a Purim food-bank table.
Tom knew before Amy told him; her instinct, he explains, is to experience guilt so intensely that it becomes anger, often directed at him. She says she wanted to get a reaction from a husband who “doesn’t feel anything about anything.”
He answers, almost bureaucratically, that everything he does is for her and the kids. Divorce is raised, then shelved until the children are grown; the home and the children, Amy says, are what she has to show for the last dozen years. Tom, in response, makes a private bargain: when their daughter Miriam—Miri—goes to college, he will leave too. It’s a way of living with what he knows.
The novel then rewinds to sketch motive and mood. For years Tom and Amy argued about a third child. Amy longed for another baby; Tom doubted it would solve anything. She “won the argument,” came off the pill, and month after month her heavy periods felt like “another reproach,” the “wasted eggs” turning guilt to anger.
They talked about IVF—hormones, appointments, costs—but their marriage lacked the “resources” to coordinate such a project, so they didn’t pursue it.
The unhappiness leaked outward. Zach, with a side-door connection to the Jewish Book Council (JBC), steered Amy toward volunteer work that lent her identity and adrenaline. At the JBC’s BookExpo-adjacent Algonquin Hotel gathering, after a day-long “nervous high,” too many canapés and too few meals, and a late drink with writers (Dara Horn among them), Amy returned to the hotel with Zach—“pretty drunk,” which doesn’t excuse but helps to explain.
The next morning, hungover, she came home.
Tom’s voice keeps its dry temperature: love in your twenties is hope and projection; marriage in your forties is “a lot of data.” You stop expecting your partner to be what they are not—“it’s like being a Knicks fan”—and you carry on because you have chosen to accept reality. That clear-eyed credo becomes The Rest of Our Lives’s emotional baseline.
Domestic life continues, sometimes with grace, sometimes with grit. A big Cape Cod family afternoon (hosted by friends whose taste is “modest and old-fashioned”) shows the household in motion: kids in and out, politics murmuring from an ACLU son-in-law, pizza debates, a car ride home with Miri teasing Tom as “angry white male” while he insists he is the “mildest-mannered guy in the room.”
This is the social world—the one where Tom is observant and also slightly apart.
Miri’s life is moving forward. She has the sturdy charisma of a natural organizer Tom once watched on youth-soccer sidelines; she gets into Carnegie Mellon and weather-balloons beyond the family drama.
Driving with Tom through Pennsylvania as she paints her nails, she admits that her Harvard boyfriend Jim wanted them to “see other people”—to have “the whole college experience.” Tom calls him an “asshole,” a line that both protects and embarrasses.
The drive takes them toward Pittsburgh’s wooded outskirts—Delmont, Export, Murrysville—and the atmosphere tightens as they approach a new phase of family life.
If the first movement of the novel is a domestic autopsy of the affair, the second is a road novel in slow motion. Tom, honoring his private bargain, drifts west after dropping Miri, a solo drive that is equal parts escape and experiment.
He eats chicken salad alone in a Des Moines bakery, the sky “cloudless blue,” and tries to keep himself in one piece (a rule of the road is to “look after yourself a little”). Loneliness becomes vivid—“what an intense experience loneliness is, how it has a lot of variations”—and his mind circles back to Amy’s three months of excitement, from which he was excluded, and to the IVF fights that preceded it. The road doesn’t dissolve the marriage; it presses its contours into him.
Tom stops in Denver to visit Brian, his old Pomona teammate—a large-hearted ex-forward with a tennis court in the yard and a Tesla in the drive. Their friendship has always had a shape: Brian, the star who “let me tag along,” Tom, the reserve shooter who noticed everything.
They reminisce and, impulsively, go play pickup ball in Five Points at Lawson Park. On the asphalt half-court they win by guile: Brian’s old-man post moves, Tom’s mid-range shots. The scene isn’t just nostalgia; it sketches the way Tom has coped his whole life—finding rhythm in roles that don’t require him to demand too much.
Yet even here, his body sends messages: when he runs “it’s like… they pulled the plug,” he gets “little blackouts.” The road is giving him distance, and also symptoms.
In the background, Amy keeps flickering into his day through small communications.
She emails a Manhattan co-op listing—“full service doorman… roof garden… private terrace”—in a building near their old neighborhood. Is it a nudge toward moving back to the city together once Miri is gone?
Or a marker for a place of her own if they split? Tom can’t read the message; the subject line might be about the marriage, or only about an address. The uncertainty shows how the road has become one long conversation with the idea of Amy rather than the person herself.
From Denver, Tom presses on to California, where their son Michael now lives. Michael, conscientious and kind, is the sort of careful adult child who checks in “every couple of days.” He is also the practical anchor when the narrative tilts: Tom’s vague fatigue, blackouts, and shortness of breath accelerate into a medical emergency and then a hospital stay.
The clinical language is spare and exact: the doctors measure their words; “most lymphomas respond well to treatment,” “some of them are curable.” These are probabilities, not promises. Tom speaks to Amy on the phone in a series of long pauses and bullet points, arranging three outcomes—(1) a hard six months then “back to normal,” (2) chronic management “for many years,” or (3) death “soon.”
He’s doing what his father did—“preparing himself against reality by arranging it into useful bullet points.” It’s a way to feel like he hasn’t surrendered control.
The hospital days intensify what the affair and the road have already revealed about the marriage. Amy calls to say she’s “been very angry… for years… because I knew you were going to leave me and I was scared,” a confession that reframes old fights as defensive maneuvers. “I don’t want you to die before we make up,” she says—an urgent plea that collapses grievance and love into the same sentence. They talk, for once, without performance.
She’s enrolled in a sculpture class at the Art Students League—clay, kiln, a tactile craft that feels like building something out of what’s left. Michael, meanwhile, fetches Thai takeout and watches Dodgers-Giants with his father, providing background noise and a gentle truth: “Well, you’ve got cancer.” It is easier, Tom notes, for people to be nice to him “when I’m like this.”
The discharge scene reads like a pilgrimage out of limbo. Dr. Liebman checks Tom’s “bloods,” makes him walk the corridor, and clears him to leave. Tom changes out of the hospital gown; Amy watches the private map of bruises and veins on his stomach—an intimate, unglamorous tableau.
They ride the elevator with an old man on a gurney and, passing children’s-ward art and lobby ferns, step into early evening light on Wilshire Boulevard. After two days inside, “the planet seemed very bright and loud.” Amy asks, “What do you want to do now?” Tom answers, “Let’s go home.”
The line is plain, but it seals the book’s hinge: home, not the road; the marriage, not the fantasy of freedom; the rest of their lives, not the draft plan for leaving after Miri.
How the novel gets there—and what it means
The opening chapters map the affair with clinical specificity so that The Rest of Our Lives doesn’t have to dramatize it later. We meet Zach in his natural habitat: the Purim drive, the synagogue stage with children’s songs (“Spin Spin Sevivon”), and the happy-clappy fundraising aura that gives him access to mothers like Amy.
Tom’s background—Catholic parents, a father who thought religion was “a big fancy dress party”—explains his distance from Amy’s synagogue circle and why Zach flourished where Tom did not.
These details, placed early, prime us to understand Amy’s sudden identity rush at the JBC conference, the Algonquin overnight, and the hungover morning after. The quietness of the prose is crucial: Markovits avoids melodrama so he can focus on what happens after everyone knows.
Once Miri’s departure clock starts ticking, Tom’s private bargain—to leave when she leaves—becomes a narrative motor. The Pittsburgh drop-off is sketched through radios, road signs, and the language games of a parent and grown child who love one another and don’t always know how to talk. Tom wants to protect Miri from grief (over Jim, over family fragility) and from the knowledge of how unmoored he feels.
The Rest of Our Lives captures the unique intimacy of highway conversation: you can say a little, go quiet, let the miles do some of the talking. That pattern—speak, fall silent, observe—mirrors the way Tom sees his marriage.
On the solo drive west, restaurants and skies and empty streets become mood-boards for a man practicing life without his house.
The Des Moines lunch is a perfect example: he chooses a healthy chicken-salad plate as a deliberate act of care for himself, and the clarity of the blue sky works like a temporary anesthetic.
Then the loneliness he’s been holding at bay arrives, “hour by hour,” and with it the recognition that Amy’s affair—three months of excitement, one of the “most exciting periods of her life”—is part of their story he can’t edit out. That he can narrate it without punishing her is the book’s ethic.
The Denver interlude with Brian and the pickup game is not a sports detour so much as a self-portrait in motion. Tom has always been the guy who can fit himself to other people’s systems (Brian sets a pick; Tom walks into a layup). His old idea of driving America to write about pickup basketball—he’d be the observer, the one who notices how others are better—translates into how he’s lived: husband, father, professor, committee member.
Even his symptoms are narrated as data points: a run that ends like someone “pulled the plug,” “little blackouts” that he jokes about because Brian is there. The scene is sweet, and it foreshadows the medical turn.
The hospital episodes in Los Angeles gather the book’s strands and answer the question the road posed: What remains when you strip away the patience and the bargains? Michael’s conscientious presence and Thai takeout fill the room with the banal comforts of an emergency; Tom watches baseball because the sound soothes him.
Amy’s phone confession—her years of anger were fear of being left—destroys the old standoff posture. She is scared; he admits he has not fully “sunk in” to what the doctors have said. The conversation is a small treaty: an agreement to feel the same future at the same time.
In the discharge scene, the writing turns luminous and literal. Amy jokes she would kiss him but he’s “radioactive.” Dr. Liebman runs the corridor test and promises to call on Friday once “the biopsy” and “scan results” are in.
The couple exits into Wilshire Boulevard’s palm-framed light. Amy, perhaps imagining some LA reprieve—a dinner out, a walk under bright billboards—asks what he wants to do now that they have “three more days where we don’t have to think about it.”
Tom’s answer—“Let’s go home”—is not a grand romantic gesture. It is a decision about the rest of their lives: to end the road experiment, to abandon the illusion of the neatly scheduled exit (when Miri leaves, I leave), and to accept that the marriage, with all its data, is still their home.
The narrative closes on that note. We don’t get the Friday phone call; we don’t get prognosis charts. We get a choice to return.
The ending, explained
The last words—“Let’s go home”—resolve both of Tom’s internal deadlines: the plan to leave after Miri goes to college, and the temptation to run from the slow damages of betrayal. Illness interrupts the schedule, but it also clarifies the stakes. Home is no longer the place where Tom quietly counts the days until an agreed-upon departure; it is the place he wants to return to with Amy, knowing that their lives are (a) uncertain, (b) finite, and (c) better in each other’s imperfect company.
The Rest of Our Lives withholds the pathology’s final verdict (we never read the clinical meeting’s report), because its real ending is ethical rather than medical: a recommitment to shared life made in the bright, loud world outside a hospital lobby.
The light on Wilshire—“very bright and loud, cars buildings people”—is not transcendence; it’s the noise of ordinary life resuming, and the acceptance that this, with everything in it, is what they still want.
Key beats
- Affair and confession. Amy’s affair with Zach Zirsky begins in the charged space of synagogue volunteer life, peaks at a JBC/Algonquin night, and ends with a hungover return; Tom already knows. They agree not to divorce until the kids are out of the house; Tom secretly sets a clock of his own.
- The third-child argument. Years-long debates about another baby (IVF or not) intensify pressures on Amy and become part of the fuel for the affair; her “wasted eggs” language makes guilt embodied.
- Miri’s launch. The father-daughter road scenes toward Pittsburgh, laced with songs on WDVE and the Harvard boyfriend’s half-breakup proposal, mark the moment Tom’s “when Miri leaves” deal comes due.
- The westward drift. Des Moines lunch; Denver pickup with Brian; Tom’s symptoms appearing in the margins of games and jokes.
- Hospital turn and reconciliation. Probable lymphoma, cautious doctor talk, Amy’s fear-confession (“I don’t want you to die before we make up”), and the walk out into Wilshire’s light.
- Final choice. “Let’s go home.” The Rest of Our Lives ends with a decision for home and for the marriage, not with a medical verdict.
4. The Rest of Our Lives Analysis
4.1. The Rest of Our Lives Characters
Tom Layward is a man who thinks responsibility is a personality, and the book’s drama coils inside that self-image; when his wife, Amy, confesses to the affair with Zach Zirsky, Tom’s instinct is to fix what can be fixed and absorb what can’t. “If there’s something you can do to fix something, I try to do it,” he says, even as Amy accuses him of feeling “nothing about anything.”
Amy is drawn with a generous cruelty; she’s charismatic, guilt-stricken, angry at herself, and sometimes fueled by performance—a Jewish Book Council organizer whose professional “high” ends in bad decisions at the Algonquin and a secret that forces an extended entanglement. “By the time she got back to the hotel, with Zach… she must have been pretty drunk… she wanted to keep the feeling going.”
Their daughter, Miriam (Miri), is a bright, independent presence—“a leader type” who dyes a pink streak in her hair when she gets into Carnegie Mellon and carries her life forward while her parents stall.
Tom’s voice widens around secondary characters—Michael (the son), family friends like the Pritzkers, and figures from Amy’s orbit—to show how marriages are ecosystems; even passing scenes (Pol Roger in the sun room, bagels, and Jessica’s smooth poise) tell on the subtle hierarchies Tom quietly resents.
As relationships tangle, the book never lapses into cartoonish villainy; even Zach, the freelancing filmmaker who plays guitar for kids at Temple Beth (“Spin Spin Sevivon”), is an instantly recognizable type—gregarious, needy, a man whose charm doubles as cover.
4.2. Themes and Symbolism
Marriage as data, not dream. The book’s best single paragraph reframes love as something you know because of “a lot of data,” not the glow of potential: “after years and years of marriage… you accumulate a lot of data… If you continue to have illusions, that’s your fault.”
Guilt’s strange physics. Amy’s “highly developed guilt feelings” transmute into anger and impulsivity—whether in romance, the longing for another baby, or guilt over “wasted eggs.” The prose shows guilt as energy, not merely remorse.
Midlife road-novel inversion. As critics noted, this is a road trip of retreat rather than discovery; Tom’s lonely lunches and prairie skies make solitude granular (“what an intense experience loneliness is”). The trip lets the book tilt from domestic chronicle toward the American road’s big sky and small motels.
Work and worth. Academic politics (dean searches, classroom ethics) don’t merely fill pages; they register professional erosion and how institutions recalibrate away from you. “Maybe it was a useful distraction,” Tom muses, but distraction slips into diminished status.
Illness and vulnerability. Late in the novel, Tom’s body falters; hospital corridors and the harsh brightness of Wilshire Boulevard make fragility literal, changing the question from should I leave to what remains. “After two days in the hospital the outside world looked… very bright and loud.”
5. Evaluation
Strengths / pleasant surprises.
The novel’s strength is its tonal accuracy—Markovits writes “quiet” better than almost anyone, letting a Pol Roger toast or a Cape Cod strudel party compress a marriage’s inequalities into a single afternoon.
The first chapter’s Purim food bank scene is one of the most precise depictions of marital rupture in recent fiction (“I saw Zach touch Amy’s hand under the foldout table”). And the book’s final movement, with its hospital glow and end-of-day light, earns its closing note without sentimentality.
Weaknesses / what may not work.
Some reviewers felt the quiet risks inertia, occasionally “too quiet for its own good,” while others argued it’s “not clear why this novel should matter to anyone”—critiques that reflect a reader’s taste for plot heat over low-temperature truth.
Impact.
What lingered for me was the book’s ethical modesty: it refuses to punish or absolve, preferring to notice; in a literary culture addicted to verdicts, that noticing feels radical.
Comparison with similar works.
Think of it as a counter-road novel alongside Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe or a quieter companion to Miranda July’s All Fours—several critics made that parallel explicitly—where the roads are less about horizons than about the distances inside a house.
6. Personal insight
Because Tom teaches law—hate-crime seminars, search-committee wrangling—the novel brushes contemporary campus life without turning didactic; the result is a subtle case study in institutional change management.
In an era when university leadership churn and DEI debates dominate headlines, Tom’s committee scenes read like an internal-process lesson: how organizations absorb pressure and how middle-managers (professors) narrate loss of influence.
Moreover, Amy’s youth-facing work (French Club, museum trips) and the statistics about admissions—Brown’s <8% vs. Carnegie Mellon’s ~18% acceptance rates cited in dialogue—invite a discussion of perceived prestige versus fit, a theme that counseling professionals wrestle with constantly.
For readers exploring midlife learning and career pivots, the Jewish Book Council episode is a cautionary parable: conferences create identity surges—and sometimes bad choices—reminding educators to build guardrails around professional highs and personal boundaries; Dara Horn’s real-world prominence in that ecosystem underscores the texture. (Jewish Book Council)
7. The Rest of Our Lives Quotes
“I saw Zach touch Amy’s hand under the foldout table at the Purim food bank drive, under the paper cloth.”
“You fall in love with somebody when you’re twenty-six… after years and years of marriage… you accumulate a lot of data… If you continue to have illusions, that’s your fault.”
“Nobody tells you what an intense experience loneliness is, how it has a lot of variations. Just hour by hour.”
“In the morning, she came home hungover… It would have been just a one-night stand… except that she turned out to be pregnant.”
“After two days in the hospital the outside world looked … the planet seemed very bright and loud, cars buildings people.”
“She was a curious, outgoing teenager… people tended to get interested in whatever she was interested in.”
8. Conclusion
In the end, The Rest of Our Lives is a midlife novel with a rare kind of honesty—its drama runs on the voltage of small decisions, not grand gestures, and its satisfactions accumulate like miles on the odometer.
If you’re a reader who values character, voice, and the soft clunk of real life—fans of family drama, campus novels, or the inverted American road novel—you’ll likely admire how Markovits makes quiet stakes feel enormous; if you want turbocharged plot or high-concept mystery, this may feel too muted.
And maybe that’s why it matters now: in a noisy year, a novel willing to listen is radical.
