The travelogue is a unique subgenre of American literature: A man goes on a journey, spiritual and physical, across America’s sprawling highways, and his trip is documented — either as fiction or memoir. Some of the most famed American authors, including John Steinbeck, Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac published, within these parameters and helped define the genre (publishing “Travels with Charley: In Search of America,” “Roughing it” and “On the Road,” respectively).
At times, the structure has even been subverted for narrative purposes. Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian 2006 novel, “The Road,” in which a father and son walk a dilapidated highway toward the coast, twists the travelogue into a much darker spiritual journey of human persistence, using the familiarity of a roadtrip to emphasize change.
As demonstrated by the authors above, the American travelogue is distinctly masculine and white. It is a man’s quest for emotional freedom, following the path of many white ‘adventuring’ men before him.
Ben Markovits, author of the recently published — and Booker Prize-shortlisted — novel “The Rest of Our Lives,” peers at this classic American narrative with fresh eyes. Having spent his childhood split between Texas, Berlin and London, Markovits lends his novel a distinctive duality. It is a story that is both homegrown and imported, allowing its reader to be both passenger and pedestrian to the vehicle of the chronicle.
After dropping off his youngest daughter for her first year at Carnegie Mellon, middle-aged law professor Tom Layward finds himself at an intersection well known to all empty nesters. At a dead end in his marriage, career and health, Tom decides to continue driving instead of returning to his wife and his Westchester home.
Tom Layward’s journey is ultimately a familiar tale of nonconformity, grounded in an escape from modernity and all of its accompaniments, which he feels have gradually pushed him out of his prime. Tom is a somewhat controversial figure who, though liberal, belongs to the dominant group of white American men who feel crowded and neglected by ‘woke’ movements. He is on forced leave from his job as a law professor after sparking controversy when he gave legal advice to an NBA owner who made racially and sexually inappropriate comments.
The cause of his alienation is not insignificant, and is most definitely a subject of Markovits’ prose, but the novel does not concern itself with making a political statement. Rather, it uses these archetypes as set dressing to tell a more timeless story of a midlife crisis.
Within the armor of the car, Markovits channels the voice of Tom, who embodies the plight of many middle-aged Americans who feel neglected by their spouses, careers and adult children. This loss of direction by so many who previously had so much direction (what is more linear than the task of child rearing?) feels akin to being in a car trapped in a ditch, unable to move forward or backward. Add to this his failing health, and he experiences a fourth betrayal: that of his own body.
In a shriveling, sickly body and a career with a steep downhill trajectory, Tom has adopted an attitude of futility. At one point, he notes, “you spend your life as a guy getting slammed for objectifying women, and then [...] you’re supposed to stand back and let [your daughter] spend however long she wants in front of the bathroom mirror, basically turning herself into an object.” Though he makes an important observation likely shared by many fathers, he shakes it away himself by adding that “if that’s the system, it’s the system” and “[he doesn’t] expect to change the world.”
His solution to combat this feeling of powerlessness is to grip tightly the steering wheel of his car and press his foot against the gas, offering him the autonomy, mobility and power that he feels he lacks. He rejects doctors (since they haven’t been able to resolve his medical issues), his wife (with whom he has had marital issues for the better part of a decade) and the home he worked for.
But this journey of self-discovery ends up leading him right back home when he reunites with his closed-off oldest son in California. There, he finds a medical diagnosis, an opportunity to bring together his estranged family and the realization that his life is far from over.
The novel is also filled with quiet revelations. For example, Tom realizes that “after a while you can get nostalgic about anything.” But his most resonant comments are those about parenthood, such as when he reflects that “if you have an idea about your kid, then that’s part of the kid, which she has to deal with whether it’s wrong or right … so you have to be careful what you think of them.”
Markovits’ greatest talent at work here is his ability to simplify all the noise of a midlife crisis into a quiet and peaceful meditation on what it means to be middle-aged and why it should not be a period of time so dreaded by adults.
“The Rest of Our Lives” transforms a road trip to drop off a youngest child at university into its own coming-of-age moment for the parent, proving that there is a whole new life to live. Even when it feels like the car is coming to a stop, there may still be gas in the tank.
