The Booker Review

“I had a sense of undigested emotional material, which is really just a disconnect between the totally normal passage of time you happen to be in and the totally normal passage of time that is about to follow, after which everything will be different.”

The story opens – quite mundanely, I thought – with Tom, a 50-something-year-old New Yorker, driving his daughter off to college.  On the cusp of being ‘empty nesters,’ Tom and his wife Amy don’t even seem to like each other, and he contemplates their future.

From this point on, we follow him having what could only be described as a classic midlife crisis, as he sets off on an impromptu tour of his past acquaintances. Will he write a book? Will he pick up with an ex girlfriend from 30 years ago? Who knows.

The Rest Of Our Lives is a story told in three long chapters: a beginning, middle and end in the old-fashioned sense. I suppose in that way I could compare it to Seascraper (from Week 5), and I did find a similar sense of doing a spiral and ending up back at the start, as I described after reading that book. But really the one I want to compare it to is all the way back at the start: Universality, from Week 1.

In comparison to the combative campaigning extremes of the characters in Universality, I found that Tom struggles with the modern world in a rather gentle way, more bemused than angry. Making dad-jokes about pronouns (“Anyway, I started signing off with he/ I mine … I don’t like being referred to in the accusative. It literally objectifies I.”) Flirting with the idea of getting involved in a “reverse racism” lawsuit against the NBA. Things that make me cringe, rather than rage.

For much of the time the ‘plot’ meanders fairly aimlessly, like Tom on his accidental road-trip to nowhere in particular. He seems lost. The narrative style is meandering, too, thoughts often half-formed and slightly apologetic, as if rambling to oneself in a diary.

“You reach a certain age,” explains Tom, “and realize, the things you used to take for granted, that everybody you knew and liked agreed on, nobody agrees with you anymore about those things.” “You’re on the wrong side of history,” his son summarises mildly, and Tom capitulates to this immediately and without much fuss: “I guess that’s true.” He seems to me a sympathetic character on this charge, and I imagine a lot of people might find his mild bewilderment at the world of identity politics quite relatable.