In America in 2026, middle-aged white male professionals aren’t commonly thought of as sympathetic literary protagonists. The fact that Ben Markovits succeeds in creating a winning portrayal of one in THE REST OF OUR LIVES --- his brief, reflective novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize --- is a testament to the subtle emotional tug of this quiet story.

Tom Layward is a 55-year-old law professor on a leave of absence that’s likely to turn into an early termination as a result of “an issue with a couple of students” in his class on hate crime. He’s still dealing fitfully with the residue of his wife Amy’s brief affair with a member of her synagogue (Tom is a lapsed Catholic) a dozen years earlier. Though their marriage has remained intact, the relationship has devolved into something akin to two exhausted armies observing a shaky truce.

In addition to this weighty emotional baggage, Tom has been experiencing some worrisome physical symptoms: the bloated face and leaky eyes that greet him when he awakens each day, the array of purple bruises on his chest under his heart, and the head rushes he endures every time he stands up. When anyone expresses concern about these alarming signs, he’s quick to dismiss them.

"Tom is not some generic character undergoing a midlife crisis, but rather a deeply realized human being whose struggles transcend the page."

One late summer morning, Tom leaves his home in Scarsdale, New York, accompanied by his daughter, Miri, and bound for Pittsburgh, where she’s enrolling at Carnegie Mellon University. But after dropping her off, instead of returning to the empty nest where Amy --- who passed on the trip to make a “clean break” from their daughter --- awaits him, he embarks on a cross-country automobile journey that ultimately will take him to see his older son, Michael, who’s enrolled in graduate school. Is his decision to keep driving westward an impulsive one or the culmination of a thought process that’s been percolating for years? Markovits is content to let that question hang in the air like a Zen koan.

Where some writers might use Tom’s journey as the hook on which to hang a political and social commentary on contemporary America and “the way we live now,” Markovits wisely never veers far from the interior life of his protagonist. Acknowledging that “I’m getting a lot of things wrong right now,” Tom wends his way across the vast middle of the United States, passing the long hours alone on the road reflecting on his life with Amy and the choices that have brought their marriage, and him, to this crossroads.

Tom organizes his odyssey around brief visits with people who have meant something to his life --- a graduate school roommate, his own younger brother, an ex-girlfriend, a college basketball teammate, and, finally, his son. He makes a stop with Michael at the California grave of his father, who had abandoned the family when Tom was a teenager.

Tom once harbored dreams of becoming a novelist, before abandoning that path without a great deal of forethought to attend law school because it might enable him to “just live a nice life, where you can pay for nice things.” Now, he muses, with comparable vagueness, on writing a nonfiction book about pickup basketball in America. “I’m just…a little adrift right now. I can’t seem to get a grip on anything,” he tells Amy in his first call from the road.

Markovits’ style is unforced and amiable, well matched to the internal soundtrack of Tom’s thoughts and the leisurely pace of his journey. Tom likens his union of nearly 30 years to “being a Knicks fan,” one where spouses stop expecting each other “to do or give you things you know perfectly well they’re unlikely to do or give you.” He rates it as a “C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.” He describes a graduate school roommate as someone who “hadn’t fully inhabited his life --- he lived like he was still renting. But what does that mean, who isn’t.”

Tom is smart, painfully self-aware and verbally facile, all traits that make sharing a ride with him a companionable experience. One easily can imagine him as the grandson of John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom or the son of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe. And by the time the story reaches its climax, Markovits succeeds in fully engaging our sympathies for his creation. Tom is not some generic character undergoing a midlife crisis, but rather a deeply realized human being whose struggles transcend the page. At the novel’s close, how he’ll spend the rest of his life is left very much in doubt, but it’s hard to leave this encounter without wishing him well.