Booker Shortlist: Book #3 (The Rest of Our Lives)

The Booker Prize shortlist was announced about 2 weeks go. The six books that made the cut were:

1. Susan Choi, Flashlight
2. Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
3. Katie Kitamura, Audition
4. Ben Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives
5. Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter
6. David Szalay, Flesh

Of these, I had only read two as part of my tilt at the longlist - Audition, which I reviewed here, and The Land in Winter, which I reviewed here. I really liked The Land in Winter, predicted it would shortlist, and thus was neither surprised nor unhappy that it has; while I had greater reservations about Audition, I recognised its strengths and said at the time that it would likely shortlist, so that's not a shocker either. I'm a little disappointed that my two longlist faves, Love Forms and Seascraper, didn't make the cut, but with hindsight, not really surprised; and it's a reasonable trade-off, given that some of the genuinely weak books on the longlist also got left behind.

I'm having a solid stab at the shortlist now, and as such, have just finished Ben Markovits's novel The Rest of Our Lives. My thoughts are below! The very short version is - I didn't utterly hate it, I'm not sad to have read it, but it's not great, and it's certainly not the kind of powerhouse book that usually does (or should) win the Booker. I'm moving on to both Flashlight and Flesh next, so we'll see what comes of those two.

(Books that I have read will be highlighted in yellow in the list).

This is a book that could have been a long short story, or possibly a novelette, and would have been much stronger for it. Like a lot of books of its type / theme (midlife crisis of a dissatisfied professional), it has an incredibly soggy middle, where the plot inches forward slowly but the themes and ideas just circle around aimlessly. 

It's the story of 55-year-old Tom, a lawyer / law academic having a midlife Series of Unfortunate Events (breakdown - or, rather, culmination of breakdown - of his long marriage to the onetime-adulterous Amy; youngest child going off to college; on the verge of being fired for some unstated but probably prehistoric views expressed in his teaching; and quite sick with a mysterious illness). 

After dropping his daughter, Miri, off to her college dorm, Tom turns his car not towards home (New York), but rather, westward - trying to sort through his complicated feelings about his life in a series of visits with his brother, his old colleague, his college girlfriend, and finally his adult son (in LA).

Tom is, unfortunately for the plot, a fairly dull individual, with fairly dull problems and even duller ideas. The most interesting part of the story is really his mystery illness, which presents in strange and unsettling ways and definitely had me curious to know what was actually up. (Spoiler alert - we do find out, at the end of the book, and it's not what he's been fobbed off with by doctors until that point).  It reminded me a bit (as a plot) of the road-trip-to-discovery arc of the infinitely superior Less is Lost (Sean Andrew Greer), but the key differences were 1) I like Less as a person and cared about what happened to him, unlike Tom; and 2) Greer is a much more charming and original writer than Markovits, so Less is Lost was way more fun to read.

At the end of the day, this isn't a frankly terrible book (Markovits is a skilled writer, so it's readable text, and doesn't drag on too long) but it's also not really even a good book, never mind a great one. I do not think it should win the Booker.

Rating: 5.5/10