Wry, poignant ... For middle-aged, passive-aggressive men playing out the clock in dismal marriages, reading The Rest of Our Lives may feel like performing open-heart surgery on themselves. But anyone willing to consider the thicket of fears, affections and recriminations that grows through the cracks of a long relationship will find in these pages an almost unbearable tenderness ... Not a heavily plotted novel, but it accrues an irresistible momentum of sympathy ... Devastating.
Shrewd ... Markovits’s writing is restrained and plainspoken, and it draws us in with the fidelity by which it inhabits Tom’s dejection ... The strict realism runs the risk of drabness; the novel’s title, for instance, is so forgettable that I have had to look it up three times in the writing of this review. But the lack of adornments helps us see Tom laid bare. Stripped of his certainties, he achieves a raw kind of clarity.
Markovits avoids specific contemporary touchstones and generally paints with a light brush. Rather than reach for the stentorian levels of whinging regularly heard from, say, prominent governmental officials, The Rest of Our Lives examines the often subtle and ultimately pernicious ways in which so many white American men feel as if they are being left behind. The result is an entertaining road novel about someone I would never want to be in a car with ... Written in a chatty style ... But there’s no evidence of personal growth in the novel. Whatever reassessment of his life occurs comes when Tom is confronted with his mortality, a conclusion that elicits sympathy for an unsympathetic character. But real change requires introspection, which is perhaps unrealistic to expect from someone like Tom.
Despite his flaws, Tom is a fun guy to spend a road trip with. He’s a warm and go-with-the-flow kind of person, he’s funny and smart. It’s enjoyable to relive the last few decades of memories that come up along his drive, and the suspense built into the narrative alongside its astute and immediately re-readable observations makes this book hard to put down ... Full of keen and candid observations, The Rest of Our Lives takes a pointed look at the way we shape each other, both in interpersonal relationships and the community at large.
Quietly excellent ... Exemplary ... This is a literary novel whose great literary qualities are understatement and self-effacement ... The relaxed precision of the writing is one of the novel’s pleasures. Another is the gradual unpacking of Tom’s mind as we travel alongside him. And though the novel doesn’t apparently offer much in the way of plot, it deploys its revelations very cleverly, with little sleights of hand that throw the story forward to its crisis and remind us that its ruminations and incidents are not random.
Engagingly humorous ... Markovits excels at family relationships: the things said and left unsaid; the weight of experience that forms character; and the ways in which families love each other, even as their members find each other irritating ... Gentle, powerful, and funny.
A relentlessly defensive narratorial style. Tom’s tone is conversational and rambling ... If you’re not prepared to accommodate a degree of introspection, you should probably skip this particular road trip ... Tom’s flight cannot last, of course, and everything eventually comes to a head once he hits the West Coast. It is a convincingly inevitable conclusion, but less compelling than the pages leading up to it. Perhaps that’s the point — that it’s far too late to escape decisions made years ago, and that even in somewhere as vast as America you can’t outrun the past.
