Book Review: The Rest of Our Lives,’ by Ben Markovits | Even white men get the blues | ‘The R…

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Even white men get the blues

Despite repeated claims over the past year that white male novelists are a dying breed, the Booker Prize for Fiction named three of them, including eventual winner David Szalay, among its six finalists in 2025. One of these shortlisted novels, Ben Markovits’s “The Rest of Our Lives,” directly engages with the wave of white male panic that has inundated so much of the United States of late, an existential fear fed by the perception that white men are not as respected, celebrated, dominant, or even masculine as they used to be or indeed should be.

Markovits’s novel is narrated by 56-year-old Tom, a white guy who feels beset at home, at work, and by the changing world surrounding him. He and Amy have been married nearly 30 years, but their relationship continues to bear the scars of her brief affair with a man from her synagogue a dozen years earlier. At that time, Tom subordinated his wounded goyish masculinity to the two-parent paradigm, but having dropped 18-year-old Miriam off for her freshman year of college in Pittsburgh, the moment has come to cash in on his promise to himself. Rather than return to Amy and their life together in Westchester County, Tom turns off his phone and keeps heading west, encountering kindred beleaguered spirits in every white man — and a couple of white women — he meets on the road.

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