Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here today. It is my privilege to speak to you about a novel that, in my judgment, deserves a place among those modern works which do more than simply tell a story — they subtly reshape the way we understand ourselves, our regrets, our marriages, and the slow, almost imperceptible winding of our lives. That novel is The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (2025), shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
1. Introduction: Why this novel?
When The Rest of Our Lives was first published, critics noted that it was more than a midlife road trip; it was a quiet poem, a surgical operation on regret. What makes it special is that Markovits doesn’t rely on dramatic upheavals or melodrama. Instead, he gives us Tom Layward — a 55-year-old law professor — and through him, invites us into the slow, accumulating pressure of life: marriage, betrayal, aging, illness, professional falling-shorts, the kids leaving home.
So what makes The Rest of Our Lives a novel to read, a novel to live with? I want to explore that through three movements:
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The architecture of the narrative and its structure.
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The character of Tom Layward and what he embodies.
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The themes of regret, escape, responsibility, and ultimately, what “home” means.
2. Narration and structure: The road, time, and the everyday
The novel begins with a confession. As one review puts it, “Tom Layward … tells us: ‘When our son was 12 years old, my wife had an affair…’ ” From there Markovits leaps ahead 12 years. Miriam, Tom’s daughter, is about to leave for college; Tom has held for years a private promise: once the kids are grown, he will leave the marriage. But instead of doing so, or rather at the critical moment, he drives away — seemingly without plan.
That’s the core frame: the road trip. But it is not the glamorous, mythic road of youthful escape or the endless open prairie. It is a reticent, almost hesitant road, weighted with shame, obligation, pain, and self-deception. Markovits builds tension not through external action, but through internal disquiet, through slights unspoken, through thoughts that wander across past wrongs. Marriage is not undone in a grand explosion; it is unravelled thread by silent thread. Amy, Tom’s wife, is not merely an antagonist: she is as embedded in the failures, small and large, as he is.
At the same time, the structure of the novel allows us to live with time in a way that few novels do. The 12 years between the affair and the departure are compressed yet felt in every glance, every pang of memory. Then the road, with its visits: to a son in California, to an ex-girlfriend, to old friends, to his brother, to his father’s grave. These are markers of what Tom did, what he might have done differently, what he still carries. Disease—his un-diagnosed health condition, symptoms of fatigue, swelling, “palpitations … swollen face and leaky eyes” — is one of these markers.
In this way, the road is metaphorical: not just motion, but reflection, a map of regret and choice. One critic wrote: Tom is not discovering the US; he is retreating into it, moving not toward freedom but toward the inescapability of consequence.
3. Tom Layward: A man with ache and responsibility
Let us come to Tom Layward. He is not a hero in the conventional sense; he is not particularly likable, and at times he is deeply flawed. And that is precisely what makes him alive.
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He is pained by his wife’s affair, which happened twelve years earlier. He is angry, ashamed, wounded. Still, he stayed, in large measure for the children.
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He lives in a kind of stasis. He has made a pledge: that once the daughter leaves for college, he will leave the marriage. But when the time comes, rather than a clean departure, he drives, tries to escape, but carries with him the weight of accumulation: the unspoken resentments, the unacknowledged complicit moments. He is also failing in ways he cannot fully control: his health is declining; at his job he is in trouble (students complaining about his class, disputes over pronouns in emails, consultancy with controversial figures). And yet in all these things there is both self-pity and defense, remorse and insistence on innocence. He believes in being blameless even as he is aware of his complicity.
What strikes me as vital here is not simply that Tom is flawed, but that Markovits allows us to see him as both victim and perpetrator of his own stasis. He is responsible — to Amy, to his children, to himself — yet for much of the novel, he resists responsibility: he resists confronting truth, even with himself. When the final line arrives — “Let’s go home” — it is not a grand reconciliation so much as, perhaps, a weary acknowledgement that some running ends only when you want it to.
4. Themes: Regret, escape, responsibility, and home
Regret and time
One of the most powerful undercurrents of The Rest of Our Lives is how time does its work: calcifying, sedimenting, wearing down. The long-ago affair does not fade; instead, its consequences ripple outward. The things unsaid, the small betrayals, the decisions not taken, accumulate. The 12 years between the affair and departure is a stretch not of healing, but of living with half-truths.
Regret here is not dramatic sorrow but a dull ache. It shows itself in health issues that Tom ignores, in his passive resentment, in the hollow routines of marriage. The novel asks: what is it to live with regrets when you thought you were being reasonable, or patient? What is the cost of putting off your demands, of swallowing your hurt, of hoping things will “smooth over”?
Escape and movement
The road is central. But escape is not total. Tom’s journey is less about liberation than about flight — and even that is partial. When he drives, he revisits the past, he wonders, he escapes physically, but psychologically he carries the baggage with him. The plot is not about reinvention so much as reckoning. The road, for Tom, is less a path to somewhere else than a scaffold to help him see where he has been.
The idea of “running away” is complicated: at once necessary, cowardly, unavoidable, and—through its very act—transformative in small ways.
Responsibility and complicity
Perhaps one of the boldest things Markovits does is refuse to let Tom off the hook. Amy is not villainised. Tom’s own failures — in communication, in sensitivity, in action — are just as important as Amy’s affair. There is a repeated awareness in him that “a lack of sympathy for you has never been a problem for me” and that despite feeling wronged, he has his own share in the marriage’s deterioration.
Also, his caregiving, his staying, his ignorance — these are all part of his complicity. He measures his life not only by what he has lost but by what he has failed to do. Amy, too, is drawn not only as wounded, but as someone who has agency, who has believed in ideas, held convictions, made choices, for better and worse.
Home, return, hope
What then is “home” in this novel? At the end, when Tom says — “Let’s go home” — those words are heavy. It is not a promise of a rebirth, nor is it a clean resolution. But in those words is an acknowledgement: perhaps that return is as much about acceptance as change, about choosing what remains rather than what has been lost.
Hope in The Rest of Our Lives is modest. It is hopeful because someone realizes that life is not simply to get through; it’s to live with what is, to own what has been done, to try to bridge what can be bridged.
5. Examples / Quotes
A few quotes will illustrate Markovits’s style, tone, and emotional force. These are drawn from published reviews and guides, as full novel quotations are of limited reproduction. Still, even small ones show the novel’s power:
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“What we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.” — this line, early on, sets the emotional arithmetic Tom lives by: the idea that you can settle, that you can endure, that what remains is always the “rest.”
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“Nobody tells you what an intense experience loneliness is, and how it has a lot of variations, just hour by hour.” — this line reminds us how the novel is not about big crises alone, but the agonies of the small, of hours spent waiting, thinking, aching.
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From the Goodreads community, some snippets:
“You’re on the wrong side of history.” / “I guess that’s true.”“I’m just … a little adrift right now. I can’t seem to get a grip on anything.”
These lines capture the voice: self-aware, hesitant, sometimes shaming, sometimes resigned, often trying to say something honest.
6. Critical evaluation: What it achieves, what its limits are
No novel is without its limits, and The Rest of Our Lives is no exception. Some readers find Tom frustrating: wishy-washy, inert, at times too passive. There are moments when the road trip feels underutilized; the characters Tom visits don’t always yield the depth they promise. Some feel the ending is too neat, or the emotional reckonings not always fully earned.
Yet these very “failings” may be part of what the novel is getting at: life rarely yields perfect clarity; people rarely change abruptly; much of our emotional life is lived in unspectacular ways. The novel introduces political, social dimensions — job politics, race, culture — but skirts around them: not to hide them, but perhaps to reflect how many people in middle age experience them, as background noise, as pressure, as obligation, as sometimes moral confusion. And that choice may frustrate, but it also rings true.
7. Conclusion: Why you should read it
So, why should you read The Rest of Our Lives?
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Because it is one of those rare novels that allows you to sit with regret, to see how the small decisions, the compromises, the moments of inaction shape a life.
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Because it gives a portrait of marriage, not as a drama, but as a long enduring, quietly fracturing craft — and both spouses in that marriage are presented with empathy and truth.
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Because Tom Layward is a mirror: for anyone who has felt stuck, or watched time pass, or wondered “Did I take the right path?” — Tom doesn’t have all the answers, but in his wandering, he asks the needed questions.
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Because Markovits’s language is precise without being showy; the moments of epiphany emerge out of texture, memory, small revelations.
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Because, finally, this novel is about home — maybe something we all at some point crave: the place where we belong, but also the place from which we cannot entirely escape.
If I were to close with a thought, let me say this: The Rest of Our Lives doesn’t promise that the rest of one’s life will be easy. It doesn’t promise heroic transformation. But it holds out the possibility that with courage, however tentative, one can face what one has done, what one has left undone, and perhaps make peace with what remains.
Thank you for your attention. I hope this prompts you to pick up Markovits’s novel if you haven’t already — and if you have, to return to it, because sometimes in those “rest” years are truths we didn’t yet have the courage to see.
