Published in the U.K. earlier this year, now shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Markovits\u2019 12th novel establishes the unstudied and confiding voice that carries it so compellingly forward in the first sentence: \u201cWhen our son was twelve years old, my wife had an affair with a guy called Zach Zirsky, whom she knew from synagogue.\u201d As the story unfolds, this voice often addresses the reader directly, saying things like, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, I don\u2019t mean to sound about it the way I probably sound,\u201d and \u201cI should probably say a word about our friendship,\u201d and so forth, increasing the intimate effect. For the sake of his kids\u2014there\u2019s also a daughter, then 6\u2014Tom Layward made a deal with himself that he\u2019d stay in the marriage until they left home. The book opens at that point, 12 years later. \u201cWhat we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.\u201d Other things are also going poorly: Tom, a law professor on leave from his university after counseling the owner of a basketball team accused of racism and sexism, has also refused to add his pronouns to his email signature. Markovits, who was born in Texas, played pro basketball in Germany, and now lives in London, develops this tricky aspect of the situation in a notably nuanced way, as part of the complexity of Tom\u2019s character rather than as a dive into the breach of the culture wars. Tom is also suffering from undiagnosed but serious-seeming health symptoms, which he vaguely ascribes to long Covid. When an argument between his wife, Amy, and daughter, Miri, erupts on the day they are to take her to campus, Amy stays home in suburban New York. And without ever actually deciding to, Tom ends up on a cross-country road trip, visiting an old basketball teammate, an ex-lover, his brother, and ultimately his son on the West Coast. Though Markovits has never been big on plot, the reader\u2019s sense that this is all leading up to something is not wrong.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Published in the U.K. earlier this year, now shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Markovits\u2019 12th novel establishes the unstudied and confiding voice that carries it so compellingly forward in the first sentence: \u201cWhen our son was twelve years old, my wife had an affair with a guy called Zach Zirsky, whom she knew from synagogue.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5271,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5270"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}