'Could I Start Again Here?'
Podcast with Booker-shortlisted novelist Ben Markovits, on his novel THE REST OF OUR LIVES
Ben Markovits has the tall presence of a basketball player and the quiet, smiling voice of a writer who is not interested in word play. His novels tackle big subjects (family, marriage, growing older) with a deft touch and an eye for small, barely perceptible ways in and out of situations that add up to important changes. His latest, THE REST OF OUR LIVES, has been shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, a testament to our hunger for realistic novels that capture the minutiae of how we live today without the need for a big screen. Having said that, THE REST OF OUR LIVES is a very visual road film of a novel.
‘..in fact what we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C- marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life. ‘from THE REST OF OUR LIVES BY BEN MARKOVITS
It tells the story of Tom, a middle-aged husband and father of two who is now ready to keep the promise he made himself years ago, after his wife’s affair, to end his marriage when their youngest daughter leaves home for university. As he’s driving her there, contemplating the past and the imminent future, he finds himself continuing the car journey on his own. Apparently aimless and unplanned, it becomes a long drive with occasional stops, visiting friends and places that do, in fact, help him re-analyse his past and perhaps re-configure his future. The novel’s beauty and power is in the masterful simplicity of this doubly dynamic ride: forward into the distance and backward into memory and understanding.
Markovits (often described as a British-American novelist) was born in California, grew up in Texas but has also lived in Germany and, longer than anywhere else, in London, where he now teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. THE REST OF OUR LIVES is his twelfth novel. His personal favourite, he told me, is CHRISTMAS IN AUSTIN.
I enjoyed the parallels he draws between his two loves, basketball and writing: ‘Actually shooting hoops is very similar to writing. It’s something you can do on your own and you just go over and over the same thing until it feels right and if it feels right when you write a sentence you’re never quite sure but if it feels right when you’re playing basketball the net makes this beautiful swish…’
I think something, somewhere made a beautiful swish when this novel was written. It has the kind of lonely vulnerability at its core that is very hard to write about. Ben Markovits’s writing unlocks that lone player in all of us.
Fantastic episode and conversation!