The midlife crisis remains a rich vein for novelists, even as its sufferers skew ever older.
In Ben Markovits' 12th novel,The Rest of Our Lives -- which was a finalist for this year's Booker Prize -- the narrator, 55-year-old Tom Layward, is trying to figure out what to do with his remaining time on this mortal coil. With his youngest child headed off to college, his health faltering, and both his marriage and law school teaching position on the rocks, he feels blocked by "undigested emotional material."
So, what does he do? In the great American tradition, Markovits' wayward Layward hits the road. After dropping off his daughter at college, he heads west into his past and what may be his sunset.
America's literary highways are not quite bumper-to-bumper, but they are plenty crowded with middle-aged runaways fleeing lives that increasingly feel like a bad fit. Many are women, including the heroines of Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years and Miranda July's All Fours. But there are men, too, like the hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run -- the granddaddy of midlife crisis novels -- which serves as a sort of template for Markovits' novel (and, tellingly, is the subject of his narrator's abandoned doctoral dissertation, which he tossed aside for the more dependable employment prospects of a law degree after meeting his "unusually beautiful" future wife, Amy.)
We meet Tom and Amy on the cusp of empty nesting. This is not a happy prospect. Tom has been biding his time for the last dozen years, since he learned of Amy's affair with a guy she knew from synagogue. This happened back when their daughter, Miriam, was six, and her older brother, Michael, was 12.
Their marriage has not improved in the intervening years. The early pages of this novel, a countdown of the Laywards' last few days as a family unit before Miri matriculates, recalls an old magazine feature: "Can this marriage be saved?" One would think not. Amy, forever trying to provoke a reaction from her impassive husband, jabs repeatedly, "You really don't care about anything, do you?"
Tom observes that staying in a long marriage requires acceptance of reduced expectations. He notes wryly: "It's like being a Knicks fan." (Like Markovits and Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, Tom is a former basketball player. Amusingly, his description of each character includes a height estimate.)
Driving west, Tom has plenty of time to ponder his disappointments, and Amy's. He notes that she had hoped he'd be more ambitious; she wanted him to accept a lucrative offer from a top litigation firm that would have paid for private school for their kids. Instead, Amy says, he chose to stay in his "dead end" job at Fordham Law, where he teaches a controversial class on hate crime. He is currently in hot water for his legal input for the defense in a case against an NBA owner for racial allegations. Amy's take: "Tom loves to stand up for racists."
Tom's road trip takes him on a desultory odyssey visiting old friends and family. He finds their lives disheartening. In Pittsburgh, a grad school friend who became an English professor teaches "dead white men" and is having an affair with a graduate student. In South Bend, his younger brother is distressed over limited access to his kids after a divorce. In Denver, a college teammate urges him to see a guy at UCLA who wants to bring a case about systemic discrimination against white American basketball players.
His old high school girlfriend, who leads a busy life in Las Vegas as a single, late-life parent, urges him to steer clear of the case. When she also tries to talk about his alarming health symptoms (puffiness, breathlessness), he stonewalls her. "I forgot what you're like," she tells him, eerily echoing Amy. "You don't really care about anything."
At each stop, Tom tries to put a good face on his trip by telling his hosts that he's thinking of writing a book about pickup basketball across the country. He also confesses, "I may have left Amy." "You may?" his brother says.
Tom exacerbates Amy's longtime presentiment of abandonment by ignoring most of her calls. Periodically, he checks in late at night, and they circle around what's going on. "God, you're cold," she says when his explanations leave her wanting. His response? "Okay." When he confides that he's feeling "a little adrift...I can't seem to get a grip on anything," she surprises him by responding, "Me neither." It's a start.
In a 2006 interview with Yale Daily News, Markovits' alma mater, he said, "I like to write about what it is like to become happier, although no one has ever been able to spot happiness in my books."
You don't have to look too hard to spot glimmers of happiness behind the missteps and misconnects in this ultimately moving probe of life, love, family and marriage across years and miles.
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